PROMPT:
Please give an example of a situation where you experienced unease and how you coped with it.
When I was twenty, I worked a summer job as a park ranger. Since it was only a summer job, I was designated a ‘Temporary Ranger’, and my assignments weren’t very interesting. Cleaning bathrooms and campsites, refilling firewood, handling canoe rentals. Those sorts of things.
Most of the job was simply standing around, chatting with my co-workers, most of whom were technically my supervisors. One afternoon, I was standing down by the lake with two of them, as they hammered in errant nails sticking out of the dock. One of them was an EMT, and we were stuck listening to her describe car accidents that she’d seen. Thankfully, though, at one point, this guy comes running down the hill calling to us.
– Hey! Hey!
– Can we help you?
– There’s… there’s a problem down at the soccer fields…
– What’s up?
– There’s uh… a dead animal on the field that we reserved…
– Oh… what kind of animal?
– A possum, I think. We, uhm, can’t really play until it’s disposed of…
– Okay. Thanks sir, we’ll take care of it right away.
I was told to come along. We left the EMT behind at the dock. We tossed a large garbage can and a few industrial bags into the back of one of the pickups and drove down to the soccer fields. When we arrived, the guy was there already, waving us down in the parking lot.
– Thanks for coming so quickly! It’s there by the side of Field Four.
I could see that right at the side of Field Four was one of the large ball pulverizers. Someone must have left it out the previous night. It was about the size and shape of a refrigerator, but with a large exposed engine at its back, about the size of a truck engine. From our position, we couldn’t see the front of it, but it was making noises like it was jammed. Instead of the usual rumbling purr of the engine in idle, or the rhythmic ‘thunk-chick-SLAM’ of an engaged setting, it was emitting a high-pitched whine. Without a word, I walked over to take a look.
I saw it all at once as I rounded the side of the machine. From the looks of her face, which was about 90% visible through the machine intake, she was about 14 years old. Like all the mountain people of our area, she had long graceful fingernails, curling in at the very tips. Her left hand and arm, which extended from the intake and nearly reached the control panel at the front of the machine, were adorned with the jewelry that the mountain folk use to mark the onset of puberty. Unlike most of the mountain people I had seen, though, her skin was now blanched of its tan, strikingly pale, and her lips blue.
I stared a few moments at the scene, not sure of what to do. As I was standing there, the guy and my supervisor walked over.
– See? Like I had said… I think it’s a possum.
– Yep… that’s… definitely a possum.
– Do you think someone put it in there?
– Nah. No, you see, what happens is that our Temp Rangers – like this genius here – forget to put the ball pulverizers away at the end of the day. Then, during the night, the possums get attracted to them because of their warmth. Of course, once they get inside, they trigger the mechanisms, and well… You get this disaster here…
– Gah… About how long will it take, do you think?
– Not long. We’ll just go ahead and take the whole machine back to the garage. We’ll bring over another, clean pulverizer afterwards. It’ll just take a few minutes to get this thing on the truck, and you’ll be good to go.
– Oh, great! Awesome! Thanks again!
– No problem… Unfortunately, this happens more often than you’d think…
It took more than a few minutes to get the jammed pulverizer onto the truck, mainly due to the added weight of its occupant. When we arrived at the garage, the EMT was there eating her lunch. My supervisor parked the truck right next to where she was sitting, and yelled out from the window.
– Hey! You’re an expert in this area. Have at it!
– I dunno, man. There’s still a lot of boards at the dock that need to be reinforced.
– We’ll handle them. This needs to be ready for Field Two by 3PM. We’re taking Unit 2 over to Field Four for the time being.
– Just get Dunny to do it, man.
– Dunny is in the cube today, and we need him in the cube.
– Fine…
As we drove back to the soccer fields, my supervisor berated me about the lack of professionalism that I and the other Temporary Rangers continually displayed. I sat in silence, as usual. After a few minutes of this, though, he too grew silent. His face was unreadable, but I could hear him grunting and humming softly. The grunting gradually grew into a series of low chuckles, which then quickly exploded into an eruption of laughter. Nearly driving us off the road, wiping his eyes with the heel of his hand, he coughed out:
– You know, man, possums really are ridiculous creatures.
I nodded in agreement, anxious for the conversation to end.
Such were the conditions at the time. I was not alone in being bothered by this, and like many young people at the time, I considered myself an ally in the pursuit for change.
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author bio:
Seth Cable is a musician, writer, and academic living in Northampton, Massachusetts. His non-academic work has appeared in Meat for Tea and Oddball.