De la contraportada

A collection of personal essays on topics as diverse as the nature of allergies, a meditation on bats, and the significance of 1974, from a writer with a uniquely acute and sophisticated voice.

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Wild Ride

Perennial

Like orgasm, 90 percent of a sneeze is sheer anticipation. You're balanced fifty feet up, the rope under your feet is wobbling like crazy and it's only a matter of time before you fall. This peril would be both exhilarating and unbearable, like the perfect arc in sex you want to sustain forever, if only you weren't so greedy. Then the fall comes. In sex, it's hair-splitting contractions and the blood spilling back into the rest of your body. In a sneeze, your body is an archer's bow letting fly an exhalation of up to a hundred miles per hour. A sneeze can be the body's most succinct release, provided, of course, it performs its function--to blast the respiratory irritant to kingdom come.

But suppose no amount of honks, even at hurricane force, could do it; no limit to the globs of mucous shot like bullets, no end to gesundheits. Suppose the body was required to fire an exhaustive battery of sneezes, like an unrelenting succession of orgasms, leaving you no more resolved, but rather, breathless, swollen, gun-shy.

Normally, we breathe an average of twelve times a minute, and the swelling of our ribs seems as inevitable as the breaking of day. Of course this wasn't always so; at one time our chests were as sealed as jelly jars. Our mothers once did all the breathing for us. Only after we slithered through the watery membrane were we able to gasp and snortle, like our scaly forebears, into this world of air.

Once we're here we scarcely give our respiration a second thought, unless we're watching a skin diver or an astronaut--air tanks strapped securely to their backs--as they tumble bravely through lethal depths. Breath or pneuma was once believed to be the primal element of the universe, milk of the cosmos. No wonder that when we sneeze even a stranger will offer up a "God bless you," as though that superstitious tic could save us from asphyxiation, and fill our lungs once more, like sails.

Now the hay mill is a rusted relic, but back in the days of my childhood it chewed up bales of alfalfa and spit the little bits up through a stovepipe and into a door in the loft of the barn. The tiny blown blades settled into a two-story pile on the barn floor. Sometimes hollows, enormous bubbles, formed within that pale green mountain. The round walls of those pockets made for cozy forts, if they were large, or kitten dens, if they were small. Green dust blanketed everything. Every surface in the barn, even the hairline edges of chicken wire, supported a ledge of green.

After hours of playing in the barn, the insides of my ears, eyes and nose were caked with powder, and the back of my throat tasted of alfalfa. At dusk I returned home to shower before dinner and, standing before the length of our bathroom mirror, saw how my naked body had been ornamented in what seemed like olive Crayola. A thick line of green ran from navel to sternum, drew ovals around my armpits, shaded the underside of my shoulderblades, and traced the indention of my spine until it caked into the Y of my buttocks. Eventually I would become allergic to the barn, weeping as I swung out from the loft on a rope, sneezing as I tumbled on the mountain made of alfalfa, wheezing as I dug my forts.

Adolescence distilled my grass allergies into a literal spring fever as, brimming with both hormones and histamines, I wept knee deep in fields of mustard. My trusted meadows somehow transformed into mine fields. All the secret hiding places in the barn were off-limits. Play, the rough and tumble, the sorcery of tomboys, ended as definitively as the barn door sliding shut.

What's it like to have asthma? You'd know if you ever fell from a jungle gym, the air slammed out of you, your ribs straining to reopen the collapse. You'd remember how you had fallen out of time, the seesaw of your breathing shushed, your body trying to suck the rhythm back. It's as if my lungs are paper sacks, the stuff I cough up a dead ringer for Jell-O, and nothing, not even my mother, is as important as my next breath.

Histamine is released when a cell is injured. Histamine affects circulation, dilating capillaries and arterioles, bringing a sudden flow of blood to the injured cell. In the case of allergy, something deep within the body, within the cells, claims the injury, and sets off a kind of alarm. The sufferer of an allergy is often at a loss to understand why her body would identify the most unassuming of influences, say a puppy, as a threat. Here I am, a lifelong nature zealot, but my body, turned suddenly paranoid, declares war on my religion daily. My allergy confines me like barbed wire to the realms of the shorn, the scrubbed, the paved. It seems I need protection, but from whom?

By my twenties my immune system found a new culprit in the animal kingdom. Now dogs, cows, horses--even my beloved feline roommate--make me wheeze and tear. I persist however, out of devotion, but suffer the consequences. And as the years of sneezes accrue, as my breathing grows more labored, I've felt an involuntary estrangement. Now when I see an animal, I know I'm a tourist in hostile terrain. No matter how luscious the fur, how soulful the eyes, there's danger lurking for me. Gone are the days at the slope of a horse's neck, the velvet of his muzzle, those lips working my palm like a chamois glove. Gone the steaming mornings, my forehead at the belly of the cud chewer, my fingers pulling her teats like a rapacious lover. Gone are the canine days, the days of tongues, and his smell like roasted peanuts. Gone the sultry lashes of burros, the glistening nostrils of calves. Who is it who removed me to this remote island, who marooned me to a vast sea of mucous, a sky full of irritability? Why has my body uprooted me from my home?

On the ranch, cruelties were as commonplace as passing the butter. Lambs' tails were clipped like branches. Birds were blasted out of the air. Fish were clubbed, kittens drowned. It was no time to get soft. Better, much better, to stave off the shock for later.

Allergens are derived from some form of life. Proteins from, say, a calf's saliva, act to stimulate the allergic state, which throws the body into a kind of shock. The shock tissues in humans are the mucous membranes, the bronchial tubes, the intestines or the skin. These areas swell and are accompanied by surrounding redness and itch.

Occasionally one of the foreman's sheepdogs wouldn't perform. Maybe too stubborn, maybe not smart enough. Then I'd see him being dragged by a leash into the back field, each step resisting the pull at his neck, tail tight against his buttocks, head cowering at the heels of the man holding a rifle.

Fluid appears, covering the outer elastic membrane of the cornea, protecting it against microorganisms, pollution or dust. Seawater, ancestral solvent, is secreted by the lachrymal glands, and spills from the eye. The mucous membranes swell to block the entry of offending particles or gases. Orifices drain, flushing away invasive proteins. Noses run, blisters brim, eyes tear.

I often pedaled down the dirt road that ran the length of the pasture while Little Bull's hooves tore up the grass on the other side of the fence. For the two years we raced each other, I never let myself think what would inevitably happen to the foreman's calf. Then one day I skidded to a stop in front of the doghouses. Little Bull's head was lying in the dust within the radius of the dogs' chains, his eyes dull with grit. The rest of him, I discovered later, had been butchered, wrapped and stored in a large freezer. Each organ was labeled by hand. I lifted one package: Little Bull's liver, another: Little Bull's heart.

An inner wind, a quiet wail pushes inside the throat. An inability to articulate thoughts mounts like a nimbus. All stimuli, even light, join the ranks of irritants. A kind of lassitude takes hold. There is blushing, heat, redness in the face. A noise seizes the inside of the chest, a rasp caused by convulsive catching of breath. (Is this sobbing about the kittens? the dogs? the calf? If I could have my fill of crying would I be cured?)

Let me set the scene and go back in time to the days when all eyes were tracking Halley's comet and feet were moving to the syncopation of ragtime. Suddenly we find ourselves face-to-face with something called the unconscious. A physician in Vienna has patients who are powerless in its grip. These Victorians are stricken with hysterical paralysis, false pregnancies, symptoms accrued against a lifetime of denial. The bearded doctor approaches the couch, carrying Pandora's box like a Whitman's sampler, and asks each patient to lift the lid and taste.

Since then our legacy has been one of mistrust--when we hear a wheeze we wonder . . . icebox mother? passive father? family unit in the throes of dysfunction? Which ancient Gorgon can be held responsible for our fucked-up lives? If asthma is a way of crying "wolf," histrionics performed for the benefit of one's parents, can't a heart-to-heart with Mom, or even a meditation in the form of an essay get to the bottom of it?Continues...

Excerpted from Wild Rideby Lowe, Bia Copyright © 2004 by Bia Lowe. Excerpted by permission.
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