CrashBang, A Word Problem

by Molly Bain

Honorable Mention, Ray Ventre Memorial Nonfiction Prize
selected by Sarah Minor

I can’t remember the handlebars of my 10-speed exactly—whether they were actual grey or just dirty white or if they were curved like Ram’s horns or if fabric wound around them like an ace bandage or maybe more like medical tape.

What I remember is flying up and over them.

I don’t remember what first cracked against the pavement of Deer Lake Road then. Dear God, I hope it was my bad shoulder and not my head. I hope it was forearms and fingers, wrists or elbows, anything but my head because I hit my head a lot as a kid, and I never wore a helmet.

In fact, I don’t remember anyone wearing helmets for anything but snowmobiles and sometimes dirt bikes.

My bad shoulder had come from a 15-car pile-up in a snow squall where Highway 41 stretches out over the marshy bits of Teal Lake. From the middle back seat of my babysitter’s Geo Metro, with my lap belt loose like I liked it, I banged my ten-year-old head on the front dash, and then again on the back windshield before that was busted out by the truck that slid into us next. What I remember is that I thought I was lucky then: there were five of us in that car, and I had the only head that wasn’t bleeding. What I remember is that after, my shoulder was in a sling and my lucky head had goose eggs on its front and back so that it looked rectangular for the better part of two weeks.

Wait—I forget: which is the better part?

CrashBang.

How could I forget that in my house growing up, we used the phrase CrashBang as a catch-all shorthand for fisticuffs, general mayhem, or the chaos of ladders, sauce pans and pots, whiskey glasses and cylindrical containers of Crystal Light, folding chairs and fire pokers, curtain rods and shower curtains, box springs and wooden spoons, old tractors and truck beds, sleds full of chopped wood, clocks and cassette tapes, smart mouths, slapstick noses, open hands and closed fists, backsides and kicks: the collisions of materials or intentions, any or all of it coming loose and going up and then coming down in the sudden pressure drops of conflict in tight quarters under open skies.

Is that the better, endearing part of being periodically slammed into walls? Shared knowing that over time becomes tender humor? What I’m trying to say is that I was periodically slammed into walls as a kid. Most kids I knew were periodically slammed into walls. It would have been funny to wear a helmet for that. Wish I had. It’s hard to yank, grab, pull, and/or swing somebody by their hair when it’s tucked back by a helmet.

I remember the first time I saw a kid on a bike in a helmet. Everything about the kid and his little sister, their helmets, their bikes was shiny, new. But it was the helmets I stared at: why were they wearing them? They needed helmets for…or to do…what? It seemed embarrassing: Was there something wrong with their heads? Maybe that’s why they were wearing them…as a kind of corrective? A cast of sorts? I don’t remember the rest of my logic. Just that, underneath it, childhood and harm were synonymous somehow. The preordained natural state of childhood was bruised, scabbed, frequently injured, often hurt. Original sin, I suppose, mixed up with Looney Tunes. We were the metal of a shovel: from the earth and for the earth, always already scraped up, bent in a bit, and entirely in the hands of someone else.

What I mean is: It didn’t occur to me then that one would wear a helmet for protection.

The morning of the 15-car pile-up, it was not yet winter. I remember looking out the window and into soft  snow coming down heavy. It was beautiful and just below freezing in our neck of Lake Superior’s lake effect. I wonder if we’ll get into an accident I remember thinking as I held a hairbrush in my hand and considered the 13-mile trip each way to the mall. I didn’t think maybe we should do this instead or maybe we shouldn’t go at all, but just I wonder what will happen when…

I have forgotten if I thought, then, that anything could ever be prevented.
On a spelling test in fifth grade, I could probably get the word fate right. But prevention, prudence? They were beyond me and weren’t on the test anyhow.

What I remember, that day on Deer Lake Road on my 10-speed, is that I realized the tires of my bike were in a split of pavement. And then the crack, like options sometimes do, suddenly narrowed. I tried to pull my bike up and out of the rut but didn’t manage it before I came to the spot where the crack had begun. I don’t remember when I learned that finding a problem’s origins or its beginnings is not always the help you think it’s going to be. Where the rut in the road disappeared, my front tire suddenly stopped, and my back tire, with all that forward momentum, promptly popped up. I was airborne. Up and over. CrashBang.

And then I was lying on Deer Lake Road, squinting skyward.
To get out of the sun’s glare, I pulled my cheek flat to the pavement.

And that’s when I looked out and onto Deer Lake.
As though she and I, old familiars, were staring face to face, coming to terms, for the first time.

The thing I can’t forget about Deer Lake is what we didn’t talk about, but we all knew: there was mercury in Deer Lake. What actual words, terms, did we use? Loadings, tailings, atmospheric depositions, leaching, leaking, methylation? I don’t remember any of those.

The word I remember: problem.
Deer Lake had a mercury problem.

I, too, had a problem. Not just one. Lots of them. I had a smart mouth and clumsy feet. I kept hitting my head. I wanted too many things, primarily and concurrently: attention and to be left  alone. I was slightly dyslexic and always hungry. Hungry for Fritos and chocolate and pepperoni sticks, yes, but also for everything it seemed, for a deer stand or tree house or a large flat stone at the forest’s edge where it met Deer Lake that was only mine.

These are all words to concoct shelter or refuge for a body I was afraid of and afraid for. My body, I realize.

Aren’t all problems word problems? I asked Mr. Kulju, my fifth-grade teacher. Because, like, every problem uses words to describe its problem, right? I thought the question was genius. Mr. Kulju just slowly shook his head at me. 

Have I, ever since, been carrying around the same slim volume of disorganized word problems, where each is just a different version of the last?

Here’s one:
Say you’ve got a metal that’s liquid at room temperature. Say you like the way it feels in your hands, how it moves, always heavy, always volatile. Say you use it for all sorts of reasons because you remember how it binds with other valuable metals and carries them away from average rock and into your pockets. Say it’s good in a lab and good in the field, that it’s quick to carry a spark. That it can detonate all kinds of explosives far away from you, which is useful. But it’s hard to control, turns out, especially when you’re done with it, and try to burn it or bury it away. Damn if it doesn’t get everywhere—in the air, in your hair, in the fat of fish and the feathers of fowl, in your breast milk, your toenails. It crosses blood-brain barriers. Bodies store it like amino acids. It goes down and it goes up, gasses away from smelters and soils, travels on winds and falls back down onto new waters, new bodies, new problems. You haven’t forgotten this is mercury. But the problem remains: how do you abandon the mill, clamber out of the mine, run away from the tailings pile, when no matter what you do, the mercury stays inside you? 

Here’s another:
A little girl is playing in the cattails of Goldmine Creek. You don’t remember how many times she runs through muck and slick algae in the 4-ft round corrugated drainage pipes installed so the creek will rush into Deer Lake without washing the road away. You don’t remember what she smells like, but it can’t be good.

A man stops in his exquisite beater of a sedan. It rolls long and low, shimmers like red jasper, the magnetic stone that gets mined up here for its iron. You forget why he opens the door to the CrashBang of his life, cigarette butts and crushed cans. You forget if he tells the little girl he’s lost before he yells at the lot of you for playing in the road like you own it. You remember being equal parts pissed and puzzled: You’re not playing in the road, you’re playing in the creek, which was here before the road. And anyway, everybody’s got to own something, right? Couldn’t the city run-off, the algal blooms, or what the miners pile up and call waste rock be yours? The empties in his car are loose, still rolling, thin tin and aluminum jangling together, which sounds a litt le bit like your lives feel: something between dried leaves and costume jewelry. I’m not avoiding the question or the answer, Mr. Kulju. I’m just asking: Can you smell the heavy metals on me?

And another:
You’ve haven’t forgotten the little girl rushing, like creek waters during spring melt, into the lake. She’s trying to catch turtles but is terrified of leeches. You haven’t forgotten how they dammed Deer Lake for the goldmine and dammed her again for the iron mine. You haven’t forgotten that the goldmine in 15 years of operation released 5,000 lbs of mercury into Deer Lake. You haven’t forgotten how the iron ore mine, eight miles away, used mercuric chloride in their labs and then dumped 40 lbs of it down city drains every year for fifty years. How could you forget that though the town is a rural outpost of cuttingedge mining innovation, it also didn’t really have a sewer system that wasn’t Carp Creek until 1964? This is why locals would sometimes call smelly Carp Creek Crap Creek, and Crap Creek ran directly into Deer Lake.

And say you are thirty years old before a non-local, an outsider, a scientist, tells you Deer Lake is on an international registry of ‘Areas of Concern,’ and you laugh out loud and tell this scientist that he must be wrong because you grew up on this basin, you are from this lake, and wouldn’t you remember that its sediments hold 8,000 lbs of mercury?

You are the woman the little girl in this word problem made, and she wouldn’t have forgotten to tell you, would she?

Say you think of your own body like a watershed. Say Deer Lake taught you that, and you love her for it.

Say you are from lands with more shoreline than Hawaii. Say the official motto is Pure Michigan. Say your eyes are sometimes so dry now that you wonder if you’ve forgotten how to cry.

Say after the 15-car pile-up your mom drove you by the lot of ruined cars where your babysitter’s Geo Metro sat. Say you said Holy Crap! when you saw it crumpled up like an empty can.

Say you’re a girl, an amalgam of prayer and angst, promise and wound. Say you keep gett ing stuck in the road, calling out to a lake. You call this coming to terms, but really what you mean is you need another word for rage. That’s your problem. CrashBang.

Molly Bain has been published in Creative Nonfiction, Jezebel, and Issues in Science and Technology and was also a recipient of a Djerassi Artist Residency. She grew up near the shores of Lake Superior and now lives on the other end of the iron ore line, in Pittsburgh.