The Thaw

by Tyler Carey

The tintinnabulations of the Spring’s freedom creep into your subconscious. For some reason, one night you rise from bed to open your windows. It’s still too cold outside to walk around without a sweater, but you can feel the warmth coming on. You feel it in some bestial part of your mind; in some atavistic gland that man hasn’t used for centuries. It’s the same thing that wakes bears up in time to get the first berries of the season. Anticipation affects every act, including sleep. You can’t sleep, and when you do, your dreams are filled with vivid images, sometimes of chtonic deities man hasn’t seen since the days of human sacrifice and tribal dances.

Hopefully, we all have a story about this time of year – a story about cautions dismissed and impulses taken. The best of us may even have a few great stories of annual bacchanalia, best told over tequila shots in out-of-town dive bars.

I have only one.

One morning in March, during my last year of college, I was awoken by that sorry asshole Roger, who lived down the hall from me.“Daaaaave,” he called, pounding on my door, “Daaaave! Are you up, yet?”

“Come back later, you jackass! It’s only 10AM,” I said, covering my head with my pillow.

“Dave, we’re gonna miss the last of the eggs at the dining commons if we don’t shake a leg...”

“I have Raisin Bran!” I bellowed.

“Eggs, man,” Dave said, “Eggs.”

“Fine, you big wussy.” I pulled myself out from under the covers with great effort and slid into a pair of moccasins and a bathrobe. When I opened the door, Dave just stared at me.“What?”

“Aren’t you gonna put anything else on?”

I stepped back and looked in my mirror at myself.Moccasins, hairy legs, bathrobe, beard.“Oh,” I said. I put a scarf on, and we headed out of the dormitory.The sky was a stealthy slate gray above us, and the empty trees creaked as we walked past them.

“ID card, please!” squawked Maude, the cafeteria lady, as we entered the dining commons. Roger and I gave her our cards and her arthritic hands scanned them through some mysterious machine. We waded through a crowd of campus custodians to the counter for some liquid eggs, burnt coffee and dry toast. The janitorial staff had beaten us to the last of the bacon. You could hear their earthy voices and foul language echoing from the small back dining room. Most of the booths in the main hall itself were empty. Off in a corner, though, far away from the windows, I spied Smitty sitting alone in a booth.

Smitty was the resident degenerate in my group of friends.That was saying quite a lot.Most of us dabbled in drugs, booze, and, when we could, sex. Smitty was prone to daily debaucheries, most recently the snorting of a half a gram of crank off the local truckstop counter at closing time, and having sex with Sylvia, the waitress whom we all worshipped. Smitty was not looking well. He was a small quiet fellow, who wore reflective glasses to hide his bloodshot eyes, and baggy shirts to make him look a bit more filled out. That day, though, his five o’clock shadow was even rustier than usual, and his posture sunken. I waved to him, but he didn’t react. Roger and I walked over to his booth and silently sat down.

Smitty said nothing, but silently reached into an inner pocket on his vest and pulled out a beat up plastic flask.He poured a few ounces of the flask’s content into his coffee, took a deep gulp and smiled. “Hoooo-eeee!” he chirped, alerting the attention of Maude, who was still seated all the way over by the door. “How the fuck you doing today, Maude?” he said, all grins and peaked eyebrows.

“Good job,” Roger said. “You’re lookin’ rough, Smitty.” Roger shook his nappy head and ate a big mouthful of eggs.

“I do declare that last night, I once more enjoyed the company of that little chippy from Mel’s Gas-N-Go,” Smitty said.

“Ain’t nothing little about her, Smitty,” I said.

“The bigger the cushion...”

“Smitty,” I said, “Don’t quote Spinal Tap this early in the morning.”

“So what are you up to tonight, man?” Roger asked Smitty.

Smitty grinned wider. When he wasn’t passing out, he was all teeth.“Tonight? Haven’t you heard about the woods party?”

“Woods party?” I asked.

“Yeah, man,” Smitty said, “Nothing but the dodgiest of scams this campus has ever seen. You see, Trevor – y’know, the President of the Student Council? – he found a way to get two grand in petty cash out of the council coffers, and he’s throwing the hugest bash this campus has ever seen out in the woods behind the science building, tonight.”

“No way, man!” Roger roared. Maude turned her attention towards us, again.

“Isn’t that, and I’m not trying to get all moral high ground on you here, kind of like ‘stealing’?” I asked.

“Duuuude,” said Smitty, “When was the last time the student council fund did anything for you? I mean, Intramural Volleyball, Homecoming, all the goddamn ice cream socials.What is this?1955 in Des Moines, Iowa? We’ve been paying into that fund for six years now…”

“Four years for us. Six years for you, Smitty,” I said.

“Whatever!” he barked. “Point is, is that I’m gonna go get my piece of the pie tonight, and I hope you chumps are man enough to do the same.”

“Ain’t it a little cold out for a party in the woods, Smitty?” asked Roger.

Smitty’s grin faded. “No.” He shook his head solemnly. “You can feel that right? The tremors, the vibrations and the madness? Spring starts tonight,” he said. “I’m not talking full grown tulips and fresh litters of pups, but the horse is out of the gate, and ol’ Mother Nature better watch out.”

I spent the afternoon consulting the I Ching. It was my affectation of the semester, but one I firmly believed in. By tossing coins and chanting, I could learn the future, and with the proper meditation and concentration, even change it. I was smoking less dope, it's true, but behaving far less rationally than if I had been. I gave predictions generated with three scuffed quarters and a bad translation of a lost tome of fortune cookies far more weight than my own common sense. According to the Ching, specifically the Hsiao Kwo hexagram, the party would begin, “well after a bird has flown into darkness,” which I took to mean about 8PM. Coincidentally, the handbill Smitty had given me said the same thing.

The New England sky was well into darkness by the time Trevor ceremoniously lit the bonfire with some crumpled up old term papers and his Phish Zippo. Four kegs, each of a different type of beer, sat in garbage pails full of ice. Trevor walked around, handing out bright red Solo cups.“Here, my fellow hippie friends,” he said to Roger and me, “Enjoy a frosty beverage.” We obliged him.

It seemed like half the campus was there. Every hippie, freak, punk and drama queen was enjoying the libations that Trevor had provided, and every one of them had unwittingly subsidized. Everything was going well until Bill Bill and Bob Bob, the campus’ resident Darryl and Darryl, both simultaneously puked on Crescent Moonshine.“We are soooo sorry,” croaked Bill Bill, who had fallen on Crescent’s lap.

“Get the fuck off of me, you creep!” she yelled.

“Y’know, buuurp, you are so beautiful?” Bob Bob cooed.

Crescent Moonshine smacked him, and rolled Bill Bill off her lap. “Fuck you, assholes!”

I walked over and tried to do some damage control.“Come on guys. What’s goin’ on?”

Bob Bob grinned up from the ground.“We each ate an eighth of ‘shrooms about an hour ago, and y’know…’shroom boots.”

“What?” Crescent asked me, “Can you translate, Dave?”

“Yes,” I said, “The Ching did show me the Yi King – the extensive moving of ones jaws and tongue...” I could tell that Crescent had no idea what I was talking about. “C’mon, let’s get you cleaned up, and I’ll explain. ”We walked over to the keg, and I started pumping it. “Come on,” I said, “Stand under the hose.”

“What?!? You’re even crazier than they are!”

“No, look, you can either smell like vomit for the rest of the night, or you can smell like cheap beer.”

Crescent sighed. “Fine, but if this was all a ruse to get me into some wet t-shirt contest, you’re a dead man!” Crescent smirked as I sprayed her with beer. “So, what was that whole ‘shroom boot’ thing about?”

“Oh, whenever you eat magic mushrooms or peyote, you tend to throw up just before you get high. Shaman say it is the sign that a spirit is leaving your body, so that it may speak and tell you the ways of the heavens.”

“I’ll stick with beer. Can you pour me one, now that you’re done washing me off?”

We sipped out of our Solo cups, and watched the freaks and friends parade by – all getting variously drunker and more and more stoned. Just when I was thinking that what the party was missing was music, a huge orange pickup truck rolled up a dirt path towards the clearing where the party was, blasting Frampton Comes Alive. “Aaaaalrighty, folks!” Trevor screamed to the crowd, “The party can get going, now! I give you,” he said dramatically, “The Big Bong!”Out of the back of the truck, three burly guys carried what had to be the largest smoking device I had ever seen. It was twelve feet long, had two Poland Spring water bottles for chambers, and what looked like the engine off of a leaf blower. Bill Bill and Bob Bob took the immense size of the artifact to be part of their hallucinations. Trevor reached into his backpack and pulled out a full gallon-sized Ziploc bag full of marijuana buds. “Let’s get into it, eh folks?”

I grinned, and Crescent looked at me. “Do you smoke?” she asked me suspiciously.

“Who me?” I said.

“You lying sack of shit.”

“Come on!” I said, “The girl named ‘Crescent Moonshine’ doesn’t smoke?”

“My parents were hippies. I voted for Bob Dole. So what if I wear a peasant dress? I’ve got to kill some brain cells to earn some cred? Geez.”

“Look, I don’t need to smoke. Tell you what, I brought the I Ching with me. Let me read you your fortune?”

“Freak,” she muttered, and then she grinned, as we sat down under a maple tree, a little off from the crowd.

I threw the coins and then consulted my tattered copy of the great book. “‘The Khwan Hexagram’,” I read, “The first six, divided shows its subject with bare buttocks straightened under the stump of a tree. He enters a dark valley, and for three years has no prospect of deliverance’...oooookay…let’s try that again, shall we?”

“How about I throw the coins this time, and you just read, huh?” Crescent asked, visibly shaken.

I looked at the coins, and read, “‘The Kieh Hexagram. The Kieh advantage will be held in the southwest. Its subject will commit no error...”

And with that, there was a huge crashing and screaming, and the sudden burst of headlights. Folks jumped up from their stupors and scattered. A deep voice bellowed through the canopy, “Okay, you sons-of-bitches! Freeze! This is campus security! You are trespassing on state park premises, which border our campus. Leave now, or we will be forced to turn you over to state authorities!”

“Aw, shit,” I said.

“You heard the man,” Crescent said, “Let’s get the fuck out of here!”

I grabbed Crescent’s arm and started to pull her away from the crowd. “Are you crazy? We can’t walk right through security back to the dorms! If they find the dope and kegs, we’ll all be busted.”

“What do you recommend?”

I grinned a toothy grin. “Me? I always listen to the Ching. This way,” I said, pointing to another path, away from the party, “Southwest.”

“You’re an insane hippie freak,” Crescent said, as she grabbed me by the hand and we ran down the path, blind but for the stars and the increasingly distant glow of the security truck’s headlights. The sweet smell of pine trees and the dampness of a brook filled our nostrils. I had walked this path many times during daylight, but at nighttime it took on this preternatural stillness. Like walking through the woods on the Sixth Day. “Do you have any idea where we are?” Crescent asked me.

“Yeah, this path follows this brook to where it merges with Mill River,” I explained.

“That doesn’t help me very much.”

“The path meets up with Route 8 in about a mile and a half.”

“A mile and a half? That’s going to take forever! And I’m cold and wet, thanks to you soaking me down with beer.”

“Here,” I said, “Take my jacket.”

“Cut the chivalry shit. That wasn’t my point, you macho asshole.”

“Then you cut the proto-feminist bullshit!I’m wearing a sweater under this jacket, and you’ve only got a wet peasant dress and Birkenstocks on.” Crescent took my jacket, and we silently walked for about twenty minutes.

“So, how do you know this path?” Crescent asked me, to break the ice.

“I like coming into the woods after class to read,” I said. “It relaxes me.”

“What do you read out here?”

“The Golden Bough, Joseph Campbell, whatever we’re reading in class.”

“So, you study comparative religions, huh?” she asked.

“Yep.”

“What are you going to do with that, once you graduate?”

“Just understand things better. I’m not in college to get a career.”

“Suuuure,” Crescent said. “We all believe that. Me?  I’m studying botany, but we both know that in six months time, I’ll be doing public relations for a Madison Avenue company.”

“Me, too, probably. But, I figure that I got to have fun and do a little learnin’ before I launched myself into the real world.”

“Then aside from getting your rocks off right now, why have you spent four years studying this hippie stuff?”

I stopped walking and looked at her in the moonlight. “Do you have to be so fucking cynical about everything? There are legitimate applications for arts, humanities, philosophy, and botany, and everything else in every day life.”

Crescent shook her head. “Name one! Use your great font of knowledge to apply comparative religion to one practical thing.”

“Fine. You know the party we were just at? That wasn’t just about some wacko trust fund kid buying some kegs and bringing a bong into the woods. That was deeply ingrained instinctive behavior.”

“What?”

“Has it ever occurred to you why Mardi Gras, Carneval, colleges’ spring breaks and all that kinda shit happen in every culture at about the same time as each other? Why you can’t sleep during spring midterms? Why you get horny as hell around this time of year? This kind of shit has been going on for millennia! Back to primitive mankind. When the thaw hits, and all the ice begins to melt, and a full moon hits, the water in our bodies is going through wicked high tide. We react by throwing bacchanalian celebrations.

“They’re probably charging Trevor with serving alcohol to minors right now, and possession of marijuana, but he wasn’t responsible. He was just a cog in the wheel of mankind.If he hadn’t had the resourcefulness to throw that party, it could have been you or me. We all revert to animals this time of year.

“So?” I asked, “Was that a good application of my bullshit studies to something ‘practical’?”

Crescent was quiet as we continued to walk deeper in the woods, hopefully, towards the highway.

“Come on,” I said. “You can do it, too.”

“I can do what?” Crescent asked.

“Apply your knowledge to this whole thing. I just gave you the whole Gnostic gospel, back-to-the-trees, man-as-beast take on our little springtime celebration. What can you tell me about this time of year?”

I was shivering as we neared the highway. Crescent put her arm around me. “This brook is going to be flooded in a matter of days. The snow melting on Mount Todd,” she pointed behind us with her thumb, “is going to melt and flood this brook. The water will feed the plants their one big gulp of the year, and the healthier plants will attract deer and other wildlife, who will live along the brook, and die one day, feeding the plants, who will burst into life again some springtime down the road.” Crescent sniffed a little bit.

“That’s great! What’s the matter?”

“I don’t want to work in public relations on Madison Avenue,” she said.

“Neither do I,” I said, as we walked along the brook, and under the pine trees and starlight. “But, y’know… ‘Be here now.’”

Crescent nodded and sniffed back some tears.“Who said that?”

“I dunno. Some insane hippie freak, I think.” The sound of the brook mingled with the motorcars we heard off in the distance.

“How about that Chinese fortune cookie book? What does it say about this?”

I didn't bother to stop and flip the coins over this one - I knew it by heart. “The fourth hexagram, the Mang hexagram, says that in the process of youth, we shed the chains of ignorance. With that, though, comes much regret.”

The path led to a clearing, which ended at an embankment. We scrabbled up the gravel, and Crescent helped haul me over the steel rail at the side of Route 8. We leaned against it and caught our breath. I looked up and down the length of the narrow four lane asphalt road, and didn’t see a car anywhere.

“I, for instance,” I said, “regret that I didn’t wear my walking boots tonight. You?”

Crescent smiled, her teeth glimmering in the moonlight. “I regret that I’m twenty-one, and I’ve never hitchhiked.” She grabbed my shoulder. “Come on, something’s gotta come along sooner or later.”

I exhaled one last deep breath, and stood up, thumb in hand. We both looked southwards, down Route 8, willing a giant heavy-hauler to appear. None did. But, after twenty minutes, we heard a rumbling to the North - the sound of a thunderous roar, ripping through the New England night. I turned around, and saw a red T-Top Camaro with Jersey plates, rolling up alongside us. The window rolled down, and Bruce Springsteen’s “Thunder Road” spilled out from inside.

A slick haired fella wearing sun glasses in the dead of night stuck his tiny head out the window. “I’m goin’ as far as New York City. Where you kids headed?”

Crescent looked at me and smiled. “We’re goin’ the other way. Thanks.”

“Suit yourself,” he said, and sped away, taking Bruce Springsteen and the carbon monoxide with him.