Super Bloom

Super Bloom

by Angela Miyuki Mackintosh

California Superbloom by Ron Thomas for Getty Images

Between 1991 and 1993, because of boredom, junior college, watersports and love, I became a river rat, driving the 300-mile desert stretch between Southern California and Lake Havasu, Arizona, every spring and summer. Most of the time I drove sitting high in my seat with the visor pulled down to avoid the sun’s intolerable glare, muttering curses of pacification while Led Zeppelin blared, with my boyfriend, Joey, and his pit bull, Blake, sometimes with friends in the backseat, once with a snake we’d trapped in an Igloo cooler.
        That afternoon before we drove home with the snake, I sat in our tent on the lakeshore campground slathering aloe-vera sap onto my belly’s water blisters. I’d never burned that bad before. My Asian-islander skin usually baked into a warm cinnamon cookie brown. But there were no trees. The Mojave mountains were merely a backdrop. Shadows ran away like small children. The coconut sunblock had been powerless to protect me against fifteen-hour days spent on the lake, and my skin bubbled red and hot, leaving white fingerprints where I pressed.
        Joey and I ventured out for a walk when the shadows began to swell sidelong from the scrub and hawks skimmed over cottonwood in search of tiny creatures bound by clockwork. We came upon the snake with its shimmering scales as it lay mid-road, soaking up the asphalt’s luxurious heat. Joey tossed a towel over it, snatching the fabric into a sack, and strode back through the crowded campground to our campsite, where he shuffled the snake into a drained cooler. We sat on folding chairs and watched spring break come to an end. Campers folded up their tents, doused campfire coals with lake water, slammed their truck doors shut. For the next two hours while waiting for the single road out to clear, whenever we craved a cheap beer, Pabst or Bud or Red Stripe, we’d reach a hand inside, mindful of the snake.
        “We’re taking him home,” Joey said, his face boyishly triumphant like he’d just won the ring toss at the county fair. But this snake of unknown species and venom classification wasn’t a prize, and I protested weakly in a dry cracked voice, heat exhaustion tamping my vigor.

        

Round our western track and back, the snake had the unfortunate fate of living in a terrarium for a year at my childhood home that I shared with my absent father and Joey. Nothing sticky or salty or likely to ferment, Joey fed it live mice he’d purchased from the pet store. Once after dropping a black mouse inside the tank, the snake, a wiry constrictor whose shimmering scales had turned dull from captivity, lunged headlong and missed. Frantic, the small mouse sprung up the tank in a flurry—bounce, bounce, bounce—swinging its tail wildly like a propeller, tiny hands scrabbling against the glass, attempting to climb to the top. Joey caught the scene out of the corner of his eye and laughed; the resonance of his laughter hung in the air like a dark cloud looming behind a crack of thunder. I popped open the terrarium lid, careful to avoid the striking snake, and grabbed the mouse. None of the previous white mice had tried to escape. They’d all sat submissively while the snake squeezed them unconscious and devoured them whole, as if they had no reason for living other than to furnish meals to their captors. But this mouse had fight in her, an awareness of being trapped, a will to escape the carnivorous mastery. “We’re saving her,” I said.
        Joey grumbled about the two bucks he’d wasted because the pet store was out of white feeder mice. That term irked me. Feeder mice were exactly the same as pet mice, except they were born and raised under crueler conditions. I found an old cobwebbed Habitrail in the garage and scrubbed it clean with unscented castile soap for the black mouse, who I named after Gloria Gaynor, her spirit a testament to grit and survival. The keeping and serving of the damn snake had tired me; it didn’t like us, we couldn’t hold it, and the tank reeked of corn chips. “The next time we drive to Havasu,” I said, my conscience nagging at the implications of enslaving a wild thing, “we’re taking it back.”
        That night, the snake escaped. I’d forgotten to secure the terrarium lid and it was free to roam about my home. I wondered what it would eat, but I wasn’t about to introduce wild mice into the house’s ecosystem, nor some predator who took pleasure in eating snakes. The raw egg I’d left out remained intact the next morning. After a month, we both assumed the snake had found a way out of the house or had died and we’d soon smell it.
        Then one night as I retired to the stillness of my bedsheets, my stomach grumbled with a chocolate craving. I crept into the kitchen, my feet padding across the icy linoleum, and as the ballast of the fluorescents flipped on the buzzing current, there it was, mid-slither on the kitchen floor. Temporarily blinded, the snake reared up, unhinged its jaw, opening its mouth as wide as a cavern, and hissed. The sound pierced my body. I froze. A yelp must’ve escaped from my mouth and awakened Joey, because he crept up behind me and pounced on the snake, deftly securing its head with his thumb and fist.
        A week later, we once again drove the dusty stretch of highway across the desert to Lake Havasu for spring break, where we released the snake in the exact place we’d captured it almost a year earlier. Stunned, the snake slithered away slowly into the sagebrush, free.
        The lake trips had gotten to me. Not just the scorching sun, blisters, and chicken pox, which I’d managed to avoid in all my nineteen years, but each time we camped, the smoke cleared a little more to reveal who I was romantically involved with.
        Spring break in Lake Havasu is a collage of images: slips of neon fabric covering the barest of bronzed bodies, (pick four) beer/weed/coke/shrooms/acid, blazing bonfires across the shoreline like some post-apocalyptic hellscape, public sex acts on boat decks docked side-by-side in Copper Canyon, golden sunsets and red hills, diving topless off Jump Rock, wave runners and jet skis and wind pelting your face as you squint with watery eyes, deep water that becomes a metaphor for (pick three) intoxication/rape culture/domestic violence, rolling down a dirt hill wasted, mouths screaming, car keys thrown into bushes, hands around your neck—and when the sun rises, you wake on the rocky shore aching and covered in dirt, the feeling of being violated and the low level hum of anger that you’re too tired to address right then and only in hindsight many years later, because these types of conversations hadn’t happened yet, so instead you lick your wounds and brush off the dirt that has misted your hair and body, gather a handful of river rocks, wade into the water, submerge, sink. And when you’re ready to drive back home, you pull yourself together and leave it all behind until you come upon something so magnificent you are forced to face it.

        

Joey gripped the steering wheel, his forehead knotted golden against the setting sun, my Honda trembling in the wind, kicking up dirt devils behind us into the sky. My head lolled against the air-conditioned window as I watched wind turbines spinning like spurs in the desert, some frozen as if too stubborn to change. The sage bundle we’d string-wrapped and thrown on the dash sprung minty and herbaceous, battling days of un-showered feet and sweat. I questioned the trip, my life, my relationship with Joey. Where was I going? The beer I drank all weekend left my stomach sour and hollow, my mouth leaden with ash. Few cars drove past us except for the occasional big rig muscling down the road.
        Without warning, the highway ahead grew dark and wavy, as if hot black tar had been spilled across it, interspersed with strips of neon light. Within seconds, thousands of fat lumps wriggled across the road, then under our tires, squishing and popping, splashing bright green goo up onto the car’s wheel wells, onto the grille. “Oh no!” I screamed as we flew seventy miles an hour down the highway, then sixty, then fifty, then forty, Joey decelerating as we took in the scene. Miles and miles with no way to avoid the carnage, the pavement slick, viscous. Caterpillars streamed from our right side, where they’d been devouring wildflower blooms, onto the asphalt in front of us, exploding their innards glutted with plant material, nothing for us to do but grit our teeth and pulverize.
        After passing through the thick of it, we pulled over to the side of the road and got out of the car, now mucked with green. We were 200 miles from the lake and I was still hazy from it; a few polished rocks in my pocket clinked together while I paced, the weight dragging my pants onto my hips. I crouched down to examine a stray caterpillar inching down the road. Neon green with black stripes streaking its pulpy back, blushed feet and hard head, a bright orange thorny butt spike spewing a foul orange ooze. I wondered how I’d get through class, hung over and brain dead; the crushed caterpillars, boiling out of their broken skins, reminded me of myself. I had the feeling of pointlessness, of going nowhere in a relationship that depleted me, when all I craved was nourishment.
        I turned to the highway behind us and watched the caterpillars course on, northbound, on a relentless quest. They wriggled across the desert, over tectonic plates and beyond sandy hummocks, through normally bare flats now nuked with springtime blooms.
        A rare botanical phenomenon that happens once a decade in the desert, a super bloom can only occur when conditions are exceptional. The soil must remain dry enough to prevent invasive grasses, such as ripgut brome, from competing with native wildflowers for moisture. Seeds lie dormant until heavy autumn rains penetrate the soil matrix, causing the seeds to warm slowly over the next two seasons, provided there is enough cloud cover to shield them from daytime desert heat and freezing winter nights. Then, all at once, they germinate and blossom in a glorious springtime display, releasing their sweet aroma, which surprisingly smells like grape soda. The caterpillars, powerful eaters they are, can’t resist the desert canvas stippled with tiny lilies, evening primrose, and sand verbena. They will follow the scent of pollen through speeding cars shuddering down asphalt highways, which, as studies show, cause their little heartbeats to rise with stress. It’s a wonder they take to the road if they’re so afraid, but the need for nourishment is decisively more critical.
        The caterpillars kept moving, despite their predators, which I heard before I saw, the shrill sting of their song piercing the still sky, hawks, umber wings, circling and dive-bombing, rising with neon caterpillars falling from their beaks, gorging their gullets. Hawks, hundreds, darkening the sky. Dizzy with the limits of my mind and an awestruck realization that all creatures carried invisible maps, topography, held missions, even organisms as simple as insects passed their knowledge down; and yet, I had no internal preset to drive me away from those who hurt me.
        I staggered to my car and leaned against the top of it, the only patch without green guts, tried to gather my wits, for I knew what I had to do. Blake circled and barked in the backseat, itching to get outside. Joey snapped his fingers and yelled at him to settle down, and the dog sat down subserviently, tongue dangling out of his mouth.
        “Here,” I said, pulling the river rocks from my pocket. My heart pounded as I held them in my fist and extended my arm. My skin was sunburned pink, but I could still make out the fingermarks in shades of yellow, purple, black—the ever-present reminder of seasons past and present—that bloomed all over my arms. “I can’t do this anymore.” I dropped the rocks into Joey’s open palm.
        He held them for a second, clenched his jaw, then threw them to the ground.

        

On the drive home, I could feel Joey’s anger seething in my periphery, his reflection in the window, hunched shoulders and sharp profile, hawk-like beside me. Something took seed in my gut as I thought about those caterpillars coursing through the desert night, a journey to an unspecified destination for sustenance, towards adulthood, never to return.
        When Joey and I got home, we fought viciously, this time not only battered and bruised by his hands, but with the acknowledgment that I hadn’t tried to save myself. I envisioned the black mouse escaping the snake, her little hands scrabbling up the tank; and before Joey could pull the phone cord out of the wall, I dialed 9-1-1. The police arrived and saw the lump on my forehead and marks on my neck and they arrested Joey for domestic violence.
        As the police took him away, I stood on my driveway in silence, a cool breeze puffing up the back of my blouse, soothing my scorched skin. The desert was a part of me now, rooted in my gut, sprouting through my veins, out of every pore and hair follicle—the sweet scent of wildflowers blossoming.