Naked. Date Friday, April 19, 2024 - 08:14 AM PST Topic Experiences Carl and I want to go for a skate. We'll go later, when it's cooler. For the meantime he's gone to the poolside for a tan. I've already been to the pool, earlier that afternoon when I played Marco Polo with the neighbor kids until my kid ran out and all that was left was adult. Then I lay on the lawnchair concerned about more pressing things. With Carl gone I have his whole apartment to myself. It's not (technically) his; he's borrowing it summerlong . . . Housesitting for a pair of absent lovebirds. This kid though, it's his for now and we treat it as such. Call Carl; I'll say. Let's go to Carl's. See if he wants to come out. Let's go to his pool. If Carl's not workin' let's go to the Bahgdad, Let's go to Kennedy School, Let's go see a movie. This lovebirds' apartment (with only me in it) has mirrors and platform shoes summoning. The lady of the house has millions of them. I creep into her bedroom, creak open the closet door, and dig through them like a kitty in the sandbox until I find these teetering things made of wood and leather and raffia. I plunk down and wriggle them on, buckle their straps and heave to standing, wait out a head-rush and march to the bathroom. There in the reflection, I am. I'm in my skulls bikini. Just my skulls bikini and these shoes. The mechanics of the soles have shoved my hips forward and my chest up. The logical next thing to do is to slick my hair up tight. I find and subsequently borrow a thick black hair tie, enlist water from the faucet and pull everything up high, leaving a little pompadour in front which I pin in place and deem ballerina hair, finishing it all off with the hairspray I happen to locate in the top drawer. Then I see her earrings. After an appropriate moralistic hesitation I pull a pair off their rack and insert them through my earlobe holes. They are chandeliers, or waterfall earrings. They cascade nearly sputtering from my head like Angel Falls. My reflection negotiates her face side-to-side and instinctively smoothes the hair above her ears. Opposite, I stare back, still debating after twenty-two years whether or not I'm pretty. I do this until Carl comes back. While Carl gets his shower I disengage and reassemble myself, squirming into my green pants and even retying my hair into a more reasonable ponytail. Carl gets dressed in plaid with snaps. I remember this shirt because I borrowed it once, modified into women's apparel with safety pins tailoring its middle. We get our longboards from the trunk of his car. We skate. First on the streets; then the streets become bike trails. Bike trails broken up by streets. We cross Burnside and the Max, past Taco Bell and the bus stop. Eventually landmarks cease and all that's left is bike trail. We know this trail goes forever. We skate and skate. It's after dark and dry as bones. We cross a bridge over a creek. We pass some industries, shipping yards. And the things you always see on paved bike trails like dried-out thistles and watery plastic bags. We reach the river where the trail angles ninety degrees and continues, parallel with the flow forever and ever. This is no suburb watercourse; it's the Columbia. Freight ships slip down its length all day and all night; quiet to us now since they're so far near the opposite shore, their only affinity with us being the lapping residual of their wakes. We should go to the other side sometime, Carl says. He says we'd have to cross on the freeway bridge and somehow maneuver from the precipice of the offramp. Or we'll buy a boat. I think we should swim. We travel longside the wavering lengths of shore until at the crest of a knoll (out of nowhere) materializes the Portland Internation Airport in thick quivering lights with jetliners tirelessly circumventing its periphery. Now at our destination, the only thing to do is to drop our boards underneath us and sit and watch (for awhile) the planes take off and land. Soon we get up and leave. Back the way we came. Six miles out means six miles in. But soon I notice a spot in the lapping shore that looks accessible. The decline isn't steep. It's pretty far down, but the slope is gentle and the imported slabs of rock comprising the embankment are small enough to navigate. Beyond the rocks is just sandy, muddy, grassy shore and then the big dark river which is becoming more enticing by the second. Let's go down there, I say. With our boards parked by the trail among the rocks (my maternal side having a very difficult time leaving Rho there with only another longboard as protection) we clamber over the crags (down and down, a bigger project than I'd expected) and finally totter out onto the flat river beach. It's gorgeous down there. Driftwood on our side, tiny blinks of buildings on the other. A freightliner approaches from a distance, inaudibly churning millions of gallons of sloshing Columbia in order to propel itself county by county. The air is warm, I notice. Carl, I say. Turn around. What? says he. Turn around! Carl turns his back to me, and I pull off my tank top. Slip off my shoes, peel off my socks. Slide down my green pants. Unhook my bra. Shimmy off my panties. Two splashes later I'm in the Columbia River. Only it's just up to my ankles. The mud squishes cold between my toes. I stand with only my feet wet, warm wind wrapping 'round my flanks like a pair of hands. I slog and spash and slog and splash forward; it doesn't get any deeper. Twenty yards out it's not any deeper. By a football field's length it's made it up to my knees. I am naked in the middle of this channel to the sea. C'mon Carl! I suggest gleefully. Far away on the midnight-blind shore an apparitional blur responds to the negatory. This is the expected answer because Carl does not like water. This time he's literally afraid a fish will "chomp off his wiener" in two clean swoops. I tell him to stop being a pussy. But it looks like I'm on this venture alone. Eventually I'm up to my thighs. That freightliner from upstream, a huge slippery ship, is just now thrusting its bow along the dim horizon of the opposite shore. Soon the aftereffects of its trail drift into my legs; slap, slap, slapping me. My trudging gait resembles a caveman's by now; I'm pushing and pulling against forces much larger than myself. And then the bottom drops out. There is no more ground. I've been fully submerged; baptized by the black depths. Wiener or no wiener, Carl is really missing out. This article comes from Shmeng http://www.shmeng.com/ The URL for this story is: http://www.shmeng.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=828