When I was a boy I was asthmatic. Not as much as I am now after some years of smoking but now and again it was severe enough that I would need to borrow an inhaler. But it only ever came on bad enough when we would visit my grandmothers in the country. We came from the mountains and the air was different, but I could usually opt to not spend too long outside in the pollen and dust and survived that way alright. But there were times I thought I might really suffocate, when there was no inhaler available. And lay awake all night scared and miserable to the point of delirium.
I once headed over the high line, not so long ago, looking for apple harvest work first and then anything at all.. And then there was one such occasion, similarly, when I thought maybe that was it. That I was going to die.
Getting around that year was beginning to be like pulling teeth already, with brand new scheduling having been recently introduced to the rails and I was seeing a lot of maintenance of way cutting through the length of it too. But it was also rough going because I was having these episodes of asthma that weren't normal for me and uncharacteristic for that time of year. I would spend a week here and a week there just getting off the coast and east. Seattle.. Everett.. Gold Bar.. Wenatchee.. Spokane.. and each hop taking longer as I got farther out into places I wasn't familiar with yet.
The aim was Missoula, but I never managed it. I was wearing out faster than I expected and getting lazy w the job search.. best I could do eastward was Spokane and after that I was ready to go look for a cup of coffee back in Portland somewhere and wait out the cold — time was up and winter was setting in quick by November out there, not even as far as Idaho. So I went back the other way. Down through Pasco toward the river and lower elevation.
Pasco is still the high desert but it's got a lot of crop land and smells like drainage ditches and miracle grow. Lots of wind and brush and a lot of dust and things sounding like they're going to rip right out of the earth and hinges and blow clean away. And I was sitting out there one day in the sage land just beyond it waiting, watching BNSF operate. Hours into weeks and my breathing getting worse every day. Too cold and winded by everything to move.
I laid down in the dirt and looked up into the dark. Nothing improving on my back but too tired to sit upright, I listened to the crud in my lungs and it sounded like a creature apart from me in there. Creaking and shuttering away like a sunbaked old hay barn.
And I got angry and then scared and then angry again, and then — nothing. And I wondered finally if there wasn't anything I had to say for myself before all the words I ever knew all floated off into the wind and I with them. And if I was going to die alone was it going to be as alone as the tree that falls or as the dunes blow. Unknown, impossible.
And then I remembered, among many things, a dream I'd had once and I felt rich then and wanted to spit in the face of the world and I began to laugh, suddenly. My whole body racked with it and it sounded like the death rattle itself.
I was frightened, but then there was this obscene triumph.. and I thought yes, there was in fact something I wanted to say, offer up to the night before I sank forever back into it again. Something that I could have screamed. Gleefully, wildly, unrepentingly.. If I just had the wind left in me.
'I'm going to die here and not even the heavens will ever hear, not even w my face buried like this in their ear.'
But then I struggled up again into a sitting position and all the fluid moved aside for a little more air. And life cling to me, just so.. like a disease.
And for a long time I was obsessed w the image of a somebody, a body.. orating..
while all the neurons are dying and the brain
begins firing all its first words.. indiscriminating..
conferring, w death itself only maybe.
defiantly like.. the first
grand constitution and bylaws in some crazy dream.
Just as all the lights were burning out.