Beavercreek red-edit

Today Beavercreek seems thin on dreams. Wholesome dreams. Perhaps the residue of all those unhappy childhoods clings to the Mermaid fountain with her bashed in nose and feet caught in the moment of transition: the agonized tearing of scales and tail fin into sinew and thigh bone. Dr Prentice was searching for the perfect fairytale, the right set of symbols to blaze a way through the brambles of childhood trauma.

            When I parked the buggy by the Alpine clock (the hands still stuck on midnight) I bristled—the hairs stood up on my arms and neck and I can’t say whether it was a reaction or an abreaction to Waldo Prentice and my childhood spent in his Winter camp but there were eyes burning holes in my puffa. I rattled my bucket and clanged it against the fountain’s rim and let the echo decay into pistols shots before swinging off to the left. I passed under The Magic Carpet ride, the cages rattling high above and the paintwork on the engine still showed a genie busting out of an unstoppered bottle. I see it now with older eyes, the constant emblazoning of Dr Prentice’s ideas. We are weird and bottled up beings and if we were to be released we are as likely to murder our rescuer as grant her three wishes.  I can’t forget him reiterating the importance of the fairy tale, and their basic lack of morality. We are both giant and giant slayers. Boys and girls with murderous tantrums and a healthy (Dr Prentice preferred the word ‘hygienic’) dislike of grown-ups.

            The bungalows looked battered. Windows smashed in and shattered eyes, sightless reminders of the dissolution of a dream. The thatch on the Hansel and Gretel cottage has this humped and frowning quality pressing down on the tiny dark windows in a chicken wire  hairnet and I banged my  bucket again, even started up some musical hall whistling, tuneless and uncheery. I got inside and it was much worse than expected. The entire wildlife of the mountain had come in and taken a dump on the cracked shower tiles, some trekkers too judging by the rotted toilet roll and  old porno mags pushed up against the spider-cracks in the glass. The thatch was pushing down on me and I crossed into the bedroom. The sheets were torn to ribbons and for good measure some thug had punched in the wall panels. Obscenities painted on the wall: There was an old woman who lived in a shoe. She had so many kids her cunt fell off. That got to me. I cleared a space on the bed and I could feel myself back-pedalling, I know lust is a form of rage. Dr Prentice said we are all blazing brushwood. We have to clear our own way through the detritus of family and drinking and boredom but this casual male violence and anger towards women doesn’t do any good. And then I saw Alice as she was that first Winter up in the hills, fur lipped red coat and spotted boots, adult boots which went way up into her hippy skirt with sequins and glass circles. She could give Little Red Riding Hood a run for her money. She could stop the ghost of Winter eating the sun. ‘What are you here for?’ she said, smiling, on the steps of the meeting hall. ‘Parents given up on you too? Dr Prentice’s timely intervention to spare you from a refrigerator mum?’  Those days I wasn’t too confident. I was big but embarrassed by my unwieldy body, tried to fold it away quietly in doorways and unlit rooms but I laughed. ‘Nothing wrong with refrigerator love...’ I looked out at the snowflakes.. ‘temperature just about right round here.’

I heard the howl outside on the steps to the Bavarian Lodge. I know there are timber wolves here and feral dogs, nice pedigree animals that escaped from the kennels. Dr Prentice approved of us all having pets, to reconnect with our inner child, even at the expense of the animal. Mike Dudley strapped his Alsatian to a toboggan  and sent it way over the cliff into Bachelor’s Gulch, tongue lolling over its shoulder and biting at the washing line binding it to the runners. But this cry was different. It sounded like the celibate wail of something old. I looked up at the line of grey pines and above the shadow of Old Luther’s Knob. Things did live above the snowline but not anything I’d ever seen. Maybe some beetles burying down into warm chambers.  And then I remembered one of Dr Prentice’s edicts. Something he said at assembly. ‘One day we will all see monsters. We will invite them in by the way we live.’

I must have dozed off on the bed because when I came too this great blue moon was sailing over the sky, pale light bouncing off the flints and the mountain and the fountain’s rim. I didn’t want to stay too long but I’d been held by this dream and the dream said ‘only a dream can love you this way…’ The arms in the dream belonged to Alice and she was grabbing me after Dr Prentice had pulled me from the showers and said I was ready for the woods. The challenge of the Tumblewicks.  ‘You’re tall… they aren’t anything,’ she said. She held up the towel that Prentice had seized from me and wrapped me up tight.  ‘Out of work actors with little sharp teeth…  that’s all they are.’  We were by the fire, points of light unable to drive shadows further than the corners of the room and all around were the stuffed heads of the fake monsters: The Wyvern, The Wendigo, Azaroth, Sloe-Eyed Susan, The Tumbler.  ‘You know something. I checked him out. Dr Prentice doesn’t even have any qualifications…

            It’s a tradition with us Winter camp kids to keep anniversaries. I only have to last until midnight. So much training in those short afternoons, that lack of light and the day gone, light and love snatched away. Alice was in the Lodge, the only figure not stooped with the boredom of the exercise, a circle of sad shuffling figures, boys and girls and tinies, hair unwashed, love-hungry apes, walking round the bucket with their candle wick, dipping it once per rotation so the blue wax soaks into the cord.  The drip drip of real time and candle wax. Only once and the candles grows into blue icicles. Candles we had to keep alight all winter, feeding the flames and trimming the wax. Alice had her candle wedged between her middle and index finger, she flashed it at me and I was upset. Now I admire her bravado. What she’d been through. In sleep I can make it right. Only a dream can love you this way, that’s right and Dr Prentice does not control my dreams.