Gawpo's Anatomy: Mierda Pasa

When I was nine, and just prior to being uprooted from California so we could move to Salt Lake where Mr. Gawpo, Sr. would attend the Univeristy of Utah School of Law, he sold the two pharmacies and we took a little trip. No, not along with Colonel Jackson down the mighty Mississip. But to Seattle. The World's Fair was happening.

We drove up in the white Plymouth Valliant station wagon and had a ball. But not everything went according to plan. My baby sister, on the cusp of becoming a toddler, cried so relentlessly that my parents decided to take the elevator back down to street level after we had waited for hours to get into the Seattle World's Fair's signature attraction, the Space Needle. The decision was made when it became apparent that little Baby Gawpo was drawing enough attention to indicate that she was vying for first place in the department of signature attraction. I remember being up there just long enough to discern that we were indeed rotating, but not long enough to fill the windows with a completely new view of the beautiful city and the lights out on the Puget Sound.

Yeah, I know. Another story of the Gawpos waiting in another line for hours, just like we would find ourselves doing in a couple months when waiting for J.F.K. to go around the corner on two wheels.

On our way back from Seattle, Mr. Gawpo, Sr. decided to dazzle us with an alternate route back home. So we got on some road that took us to Eastern Washington where we visited friends in Ellensberg. These folks used to live in Turlock, but moved a couple years prior to our 1963 visit. When we got there, one of the sons had jumped from the haystack out in the barn and impaled his knee on a deer antler. To be sure, a ruminant's revenge. The kid's name was Chip. His brothers and some friends had pantsed him in the barn to investigate the severity of the wound. So when they brought him into the house, each arm over the shoulder of a concerned helper, I was wincing along with the tune of his pain. Chip was in so much pain that, when his mother reminded him that he was only in his underwear and the neighbor girl was seeing him like that, he said with a very pained look on his face, "I don't care." Wow. Now that is the definition of pain if ever I'd seen it. A 12 or 13 year old boy not caring that a girl see him in his white jockeys. There they were, out in the barn just trying to have some fun when something else decided to happen.

We left our friends and headed home, down Eastern Washington, Eastern Oregon on Hwy 97, and then on whatever highway takes you through Susanville before connecting to Hwy 99. Did I-5 exist back then? I don't recall.

Just a few miles outside Susanville it began to snow. Hard. All I remember before kissing chaos is our father yelling, "Hold on!" He raised his arms and braced himself on the headliner of the Valliant. We left the roadway across the right shoulder after spinning a 360 on the now slick highway. We rolled two times. And then one half time more. All I remember after coming to rest is the huge silver camera case that housed Mr. Gawpo, Sr's 4x5 Poloroid camera setup and its accessories. The camera case seemed to freeze as if in still frame just prior to falling on my legs. We were inverted and all was now a matter of discovering what was at the end of the anti-rainbow. It was eerily quiet. No one cried. My father's muffled voice called out a question about whether we were all right.

The baby got a tiny bump on her forehead. My younger-by-two-years sister got a huge knot on her forehead and a swollen nose when she brilliantly used them to knock out a side window so we could escape. My father had a small scratch on his forehead. My mother had a severe whiplash. She would be flying the flag of her injury, the flesh colored neck brace, for months after the crash.

The next single memory I have after exiting the overturned white vehicle in the field of white snow was that single spinning rear tire. Many years later, I would be keenly reminded of that vision in the film, Fargo. I ran to the roadway and immediately flagged down an eighteen wheeler. My father had told me to flag someone down. So, taking the directive to heart, I stood in the middle of the highway, caring not that I could be further inconvenienced by death and flagged that semi down. My father and oldest younger sister rode with the trucker. Mrs. Gawpo, Sr. and I got to ride in the CHP car along with the baby. I remember the sound of the police radio. And the heater. Already having been hooked similarly by Cheerios, I was here hooked on the goodness of cops.

The mural of the story? Mierda Pasa. Things happen to us that we cannot control. Or maybe it's a case of the Universe spinning us into what appears to us an unintelligible control of its own. See Blue for the explanation on that one.

The baby's cries brought an end to our hopes of eating in the Space Needle. I don't know where we went after landing on the streets of Seattle, but whatever it was, it became what was for us, the next meant-to-be.

Chip was just having some fun, and he wound up perforated, pierced, his arms outstretched across two pairs of shoulders, crucified by happenstance and a luck for which he had not bargained. His perizonium exposed and the usual attendant embarrassment temporarily suspended by the greater grip of his pain.

The happy family enjoying the rare spectacle of snow, smacked in the face by the rude logic of physics: lack of traction plus velocity plus momentum plus inertia plus what Newton says of gravity: "That nostalgia in things to become spheres." Rolling twice in a car and surviving can round anyone out. This became the only time in my life that I can remember my father calling my sister and me to his side, tenderly beckoning, "Come'ere." We walked to where he sat in that little chair by the door at the cheap Susanville motel, our mother proned out on the bed and unable to move her neck. Then just looking at us in silence for such an uncomfortably long time, I finally had to ask, "What do you want, Dad?" "I just wanted to look at you," he said. I didn't get it then. But now it's all too clear. We were out of control and alive. We had parents. We were still a family. Lesser events have killed many. I am grateful beyond measure for the deepened appreciation that has come with disappointment.

Mierda pasa. And when it does, sometimes you need to pay attention to what happens next. Life can rip the shirt right off your back just as easily as it gave it to you. I have so many more great memories over what happened after something didn't go according to plan than I will ever begin to have over the things that did.

Sometimes, I guess, you just have to wear your pants a little higher, that's all. Come on, cadets are marching. So, as Linda Ellerbee used to say, "...and so it goes."