Hot Springs Eternal

It’s one in the morning when we get to the hot springs and the hitch hikers have been asleep for hours. This is the perfect hot spring time, because it’s free. There’s a booth when you pull into the hot springs, and sometimes there’s someone there charging you and sometimes there’s not. Late nights are good for freeness and freedom, except that I realize as I pull in that there’s a gate now, and it’s closed. There’s a big truck/RV pullout on the other side of the road, so I pull into it and wake the hitch hikers up. They pull their tent out and leave their food in Bro’s crate, in case of bears or hungry Border Collies.

I stick my flashlight in my back pocket, just in case, and walk across the street in the dusk that passes for dark here. There’s a glow off to the right of the gate, and I remember from a conversation with a Norwegian couple the last time I was here that a couple from town lives out here for free in exchange for watching the gate. Why are they awake? I walk the path next to the gate, my feet crunching embarrassingly loud on the gravel and I’m scared. They’re having a big fire in their back yard. They don’t see me. I hope there’s no one else in the hot springs. I’d hate to have to wear my t-shirt in there and get it wet. What if there’s a rapist in the hot springs? What will I do? There are three kinds of rapists, I think. The ones who will rape any woman, the ones who will rape any woman they think they can, and the ones who will rape any woman they think they can get away with, ego, body, and reputation intact. I try to figure out how to respond to each one, if he happens to be waiting for me in the hot springs.

A bird alarm calls and I freeze, holding my breath for a long minute before I realize that I’m the cause for alarm. I’m almost shaking, so I stop and ask myself what’s going on? Am I having an instinct or am I having neurotic weirdness? Neurotic weirdness, I decide, and left over adrenaline from the cops earlier.

We’d been driving down the road when the RV in front of us had suddenly hit it’s brakes and pulled over to a couple cop cars, which I soon saw were practically an entire road block. I yelled and we scrambled to put seat belts on, the girl in back scrambling to hide under their packs, since there’s no seat belt back there.

“Ma’am,” the cop said, shining his flashlight in my face in broad daylight. “Can I see your ID and papers for the car?”

“Sure.” I tried to smile but I couldn’t breath. I have this major cop phobia, and sometimes it just kicks in.

I handed him my ID, registration, and paperwork showing that the names on both belonged to me.

“Where are you going?”

“Alaska.” I put my hands down so he wouldn’t see their shaking.

“And where are you coming from?”

“Alaska.”

“Are you going there or coming from there?”

“Both.”

“I see.” He walked behind the car and checked the license plate, then handed the papers back to me. “Have a nice day.”

That’d been all, and my legs hadn’t stopped shaking for half an hour. Sometimes I’m totally fine with cops, but sometimes I just react like I’m eight with a gun in my face again.

The trail is that dark, rich earth, and I sit in it until I’m grounded. Still adrenalated, but grounded. If I get raped it will not be because I’m in the hot springs, or because I’m a woman, or because I was born with a vagina. It will be because I live in an imperialist patriarchy that implicitly allows and encourages rape, and there’s not much to do about that. The trail turns to a wooden walkway soon, and there’s a sign: “Do Not Feed Bears. A Fed Bear Is A ead Bear (as if we’re responsible for assholes shooting bears that have been fed). BC Safety Whatever Is Conducting A Bear Aversion Program In This Area. You May Hear Loud Noises In The Woods.” Great.

I see the steam before I see the hot springs. It rises up like magic, like the water is the sister of the Birch trees that stand around it. There’s no one there. Of course not, who else but me would walk through the woods in the dark to dip themselves in hot sulpher water? I drop my clothes on a bench and wade in slowly. I hear some banging and more alarm calls in the woods. Bear? Bear aversion training? Or the people from the house by the gate?

I imagine them explaining to the cops, “Officer, she was naked in the hot springs?”

What would I say? Why yes, Officer, I was naked, and so are you without your illusions of control? I giggle and slip down under the water. Do the Bear Aversion people care about everyone else they affect with their banging? Do they think that only Bears live in the woods?

It’s so hot. I get out and pull my fingernails over my whole body to get clean. You can’t do that when other people are in the hot springs. There’s more banging and more bird alarm calls. Bear Aversion, I decide. Just in case I slip back into the water and disappear myself into a swampy corner. I love this place. No one comes, Bear or Human, so I float out into the middle and sing a song with no words to the birch trees.

I love birch trees. Once I spent months walking around, going where the birch trees told me, eating blue bells and rabbits (hares, actually). Every time I met a wise looking birch I would stop and ask, “which way?” You’d think I would have ended up horribly lost, and I thought I would too, but just as it started to get cold I ended up on a road.

A fish brushes up against me. The fish here are Chum, I think, but they aren’t like other Chum. They separated themselves from other Chum a few gazillion years ago and evolved differently here.

More banging in the woods. Fucking Bear Aversion people. I go silent, just in case, just like all the birds and animals. Then an owl calls.

When I get out the air is cold, but I’m hot. I grab my shirts from the table and find the little pouch I wear around my neck empty. Where’s my little patch knife? I shake the shirts out the knife falls on my foot, as usual. Katie gave it to me, and it has her heart on it. The wood of the walkway almost glows in the half dark, and I walk ever so slowly and quietly back past the people sleeping in their fancy RV’s, past the party in the back yard at the gate keepers, across the street, and into my van where Bro is keeping the bed warm.

I fall asleep without taking off any clothes and wake up with my own knife at my throat.