Wade Rouse - At Least in the City Someone Would Hear Me Scream: Misadventures in Search of the Simple Life

To MY PARENTS and GRANDPARENTS

You taught me that tires on gravel roads, and locusts, and whip-poor-wills singing after a thunderstorm were really the voice of God. And you were right. It just took me a few decades to realize it.

To GARY, Who Taught Me

Do not go where the path may lead,
Go instead where there is no path
And leave a trail.

R ALPH W ALDO E MERSON

Readers need to know that names (besides me, Gary, and a few of our family and friends) and identifying characteristics have been changed, and, in some instances, characters were composited, locations and details recast, and time compressed. This was done to protect anonymity and streamline the narrative, and also out of a sincere desire to remain in the cottage and county I now love and call home.

Green acres is the place to be.

Farm livin is the life for me.

As I came home through the woods with my string of fish, trailing my pole, it being now quite dark, I caught a glimpse of a woodchuck stealing across my path, and felt a strange thrill of savage delight, and was strongly tempted to seize and devour him raw; not that I was hungry then, except for that wildness which he represented. Once or twice, however, while I lived at the pond, I found myself ranging the woods, like a half-starved hound, with a strange abandonment, seeking some kind of venison which I might devour, and no morsel could have been too savage for me. The wildest scenes had become unaccountably familiar.

H ENRY D AVID T HOREAU , Walden

Of all the wonders of nature, a tree in summer is perhaps the most remarkable; with the possible exception of a moose singing Embraceable You in spats.

W OODY A LLEN

T heres a raccoon on my head.

And I dont particularly look good in hats.

Especially when theyre still moving.

I certainly wish this were one of those Hey, look at me standing here on vacation in Wall Drug wearing a fifteen-dollar coonskin cap pretending to be Daniel Boone, so hurry up and take the goddamn picture! moments, but its not.

No, my cap is very much alive, very much pissed off, and very much sporting a bad stink, a head filled with razor fangs, and a lot of painfully sharp claws.

But I guess Id be pissed off, too, if someone interrupted my late-night dinner reservation.

Who knew that in the woods you simply cant shove a forgotten bag of trash into your garbage can?

I didnt.

Thats because Im a city boy, a self-obsessed gay man who intentionally bedazzled himself in roughly $1,000 worth of trendy clothing just to walk the trash out in the middle of fucking nowhere!

I honestly believe, deep down, that I am like K-Fed in Vegas, or some pseudocelebrity on vacation who just might be ambushed by the paparazzi at any moment.

But Im really just a lost soul, in every possible way.

Not long ago, I moved to the woods of Michigan from the city, because I wanted to be a modern-day Henry David Thoreau.

My goal? To find myself, to find my modern-day Walden Pond, by stripping away superfluous luxuries and living a plainer, simpler life.

Thoreau famously wrote: I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.

And he is right. The woods have already taught me something of great value: I am going to die. Specifically, I am going to die after being disfigured by a raccoon.

But at least I have had a life-changing epiphany, albeit a bit too late. The epiphany Never go to a place that doesnt have a Starbucks within arms reach or you might find a wild animal clinging to your scalp has already edged out my all-time favorite epiphany, the one I had in eighth grade: My God, my thingy doesnt seem to work when I kiss girls!

The raccoon digs its claws into the side of my head and begins to burrow, like its trying to bury the apple core it still has in its mouth into the middle of my brain.

My hair! I think. Youre jacking up my hair!

Which is another reason why I shouldnt be living in the woods. I care more about how my profile will look when Im found dead than about actually trying to stay alive.

The raccoon locates an artery, and I begin screaming, like any man who is truly scared for his life.

And then I pee on myself.

I admit it. There is no shame.

I scream again, yelling, Help! Help! Theres a raccoon on my head! Can somebody, anybody, help me?

But I sadly realize this is a rhetorical question, that it doesnt matter what I yell, because no one can hear me in the woods. My closest neighbor is a holler away, or what ever the hell they say out here in the country.

In fact, my yells simply echo off the surrounding pines, the voice coming back to me sounding a whole lot like Drew Barrymore right before she gets offed at the beginning of Scream.

I do have enough wherewithal, however, to scrunch my eyes shut, in order to protect my vision, and to begin spinning like a top, twirling like a drunken, crazed ballerina, to jostle the beast free. Unfortunately, the coon is along for the ride.

I can feel blood beginning to trickle down my face.

I will later read on Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia: Raccoons are unusual for their thumbs, which (though not opposable) enable them to open many closed containers (such as garbage cans) and doors. The raccoon is most distinguishable by the black mask of fur around its eyes and the long, bushy tail. They are intelligent omnivores with a reputation for being clever, sly, and mischievous. Raccoons range from 20 to 40 inches in length (including the tail) and weigh between 10 and 35 pounds. As city dwellers in the United States and Canada increasingly move into primary or second homes in former rural areas, raccoons are often considered pests because they forage in trash receptacles.

I, of course, read this too late, like I do everything in my life: the nutrition chart on Little Debbie boxes, the prescription for my Xanax, the size 4 tag in the back of my mens jeans.

However, I am a child of the 70s, which means I didnt really have to read to learn anything; I just had to watch TV. And that I did.

Thats when it hits me. The solution to my problems.

What would Lucy do? I ask myself.

Lucy would fight back, in some wacky-chocolate-factory, grape-stompin, Vitameatavegamin way!

So I grab the garbage can lid, and the flashlight I am holding, and begin to wield them like shields, like Brad Pitt in Troy, and whack the raccoon, taking part of my temple along with it. But the coon doesnt budge. It screeches and digs its claws more deeply into my skull.