Disenchantment 3

I had walked directly into the drainage wash, fallen over the lip, and rolled down to the bottom into a muddy, stagnant puddle of water, still urinating when I came to a stop. I was now soaked and muddy. I was pretty sure the foul sewage stench was from the puddle I landed in, but I was also pretty sure that I had gotten quite a bit of my own urine on me as I had rolled down the side of the wash.

That’s not exactly the first time I have fallen over while drinking, but it was the first time that I A: fell over while peeing, and B: fell into a drainage ditch.

I was slightly stunned, not by any head wound, although I had a scrape. but it took me a few seconds to figure out what had happened. I was drunk. It was pitch black out. One second I was urinating, the next I was falling. It took a few seconds to wrap my brain around such an unexpected tumble. I just went ahead and finished pissing on myself. At that point, I didn’t think that it really mattered so much.

After maybe a minute or so, I stood up. I had some minor pain on my right elbow, my left knee and my forehead. Later I learned I had scraped myself up on the concrete on the way down. My penis felt fine, which made me slightly happy. He had been through enough torture for one evening. I even cringed a little thinking about what would have happened if I had scraped that up. I pulled up and zipped my shorts.

My eyes had started to adjust to the darkness, but it still was no easy feat to see anything. It was a dark night. The smell was awful. It smelled worse than fecal matter, old rotten decay and death permeated my nostrils. For all I knew there were leeches in that water and I would probably have to check myself later for them.

Of course, being in Southern California, these massive drainage ditches are used to prevent flooding, as there is not enough vegetation in the arid California desert areas to soak up the rain as there might be in other parts of the world. They prevent serious rainfall from actually becoming dangerous to people and property when the potential for flash floods occur.

When I was in elementary school, and perhaps a bit in junior high school, we used to explore all the sewage tunnels. In addition to the main wash there were dozens and dozens of concrete tunnels that allowed water from the surrounding neighborhoods to drain into the main wash. Because we were weird, my friend Mark and I, we used to map them out while exploring them, kind of reminiscent of the Dungeons and Dragons that we used to play. That all ended when my mother found out we were sneaking into the wash to explore and freaked out, claiming that we could get caught in flash flood, especially in the tunnels, and it only took an instant. My mother ended up being quite correct when two kids were killed in a rainstorm while hiking through the wash the year before I entered high school. My mother wasn’t above the, I told you so, mentality. However, we did that in Saugus, and this was more Newhall area. Even if I was in Saugus at that point, I doubt I would remember much about the exploration as it had occurred three decades prior. As an adult, it wasn’t exactly my thing to wander around exploring tunnels that I could probably get a map to at the local library, if I even bothered enough to care about them at all.

For everything I didn’t know about these drainage ditches and tunnels there was one thing I knew for sure, they did not have raw sewage, black water, toilet water in them. Those were part of a separate sewage system. This funky, foul, grotesque stench shouldn’t have been evident in that place. I knew I had some minor abrasions and if I hadn’t been drunk, I might have been bit worried that there was E-coli or other bacteria getting into my bloodstream. The smell was not typical rotting plant life, or even a small, dead animal. It was infinitely worse, so bad that it was almost forcing me to prematurely sober up.

I can usually hold my booze without getting sick, but the smell, and maybe partially the alcohol, was forcing me to get a little nauseous. I was pretty sure that Perry would not be letting me back into her car in that state. I couldn’t stand the smell. I knew damn well that she wouldn’t tolerate it.

I wasn’t even sure what direction the car was in at first. I had to stand there for some time until my eyes adjusted the best they were going to, to be able to roughly see the side of the wash. It had to be there that I had fallen down.

Well, I remember thinking, at least I will have a story to tell about this. I’ll have another idiotic story to add to my repertoire for party conversations. “I hope Perry has some spare clothes in her trunk,” I mumbled to myself.

Normally that sort of situation might strike fear into someone, but I was high on liquid courage, and once the initial shock had worn off, I was finding the situation a bit humorous. “Perry,” I said in a voice slightly louder than my normal, conversational voice. “Hey Perry, are you up there?”

Nothing. At that point I really listened for the first time. There wasn’t a sound to be heard. It wasn’t quiet, but absolutely silent. I like the outdoors and I have been camping and hiking multiple times. There is always the sound of nature, crickets chirping, frogs croaking. The air was still and I couldn’t hear so much as a breeze whispering through the trees. It was as if someone had hit the mute button on the soundtrack of Oren’s life.

“Perry!” I yelled.

I was greeted with a complete lack of auditory stimuli. I figured that she was probably in her car listening to her Christmas songs.

I supposed that I could complain to her once I got back up.

I started to attempt to climb out. I don’t know the exact angle of the wash, but it’s designed to be able to get out of relatively easily if one leaned forward some to make up for the far-from-level ground/wall. It’s not a sheer drop off, and I had rolled down it, not merely dropped twenty-or-so feet. Yet, as soon as I put my foot on the side and put pressure on it, it slid down immediately, causing me to lose my balance and almost fall over yet again.

My phone, I thought. I took it out of my pocket. Well, of course it was wet. I tried to turn it on, my fingers finding the power button in the dark, to no avail.

“Perry!” There was nothing remotely quiet about the way I called my wife’s name at that point. “Hey! Perry!”

Silence, once again, was the only answer.

I took a deep breath and yelled at the top of my lungs, “PERRY!”

Nothing.

I slowly put my foot back on the incline and moved it around. It was very slick and I knew that I wouldn’t get any traction. Feeling the bottom of my shoes, I realized there was a lot of gunk on them. After briefly attempting to clean the bottom of one of them, blindly in the near pitch blackness, I placed it again on the ascending slab of concrete, and it was still slick. I moved it around a bit, and almost lost my balance again because it was very slippery. I then touched what I thought would be concrete, but it was wet and slimy. Running my hand along several feet, the whole thing seemed to be wet and slimy. There was no way I would be able to get myself up that way.

“Perry! What the hell are you doing?”

There was only the distinct sound of nothing at first, but then I detected a low rumbling, so low initially, that on a normal night with natural sounds I wouldn’t have been able to hear it. It was familiar, but I had been through quite a bit, and was having trouble placing it. The sound got progressively louder. I suddenly realized what it was and felt a little foolish that it hadn’t come to me earlier. Of course, it was a car coming down the road.

“Help!” I screamed into the night. The car didn’t seem to be slowing down, and I waited until I guessed it was right above me, finally able to see a little light above me from the car’s headlights, I took another deep breath and yelled it at the loudest volume that I possibly could, “HELP!”

The car, just continued going, engine sound peaking, then dwindling, the faint sound of rubber on the asphalt, the light of the car fading, and another sound, as I had distinctly heard several words from a song: “All of the other reindeer...” when the vehicle was at its closest to me. “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.” They were listening to Christmas songs, probably the same station that Perry had been listening to. Fucking Christmas songs are going to kill me tonight.

“Perry!” I tried again, not at all expecting anything, so I wasn’t too terribly disappointed when I didn’t get a response.

It then occurred to me that my world had gotten briefly brighter when the car passed, but it should be brighter than it was because the last time I paid any attention, Perry had had her headlights on. There was no reason to have turned them off, it’s not like we had significant plans to stay there for a long time. I also realized that I couldn’t hear the engine of Perry’s car. My heart skipped a beat at that. It wasn’t fear for my life or safety, but I really didn’t want to be stuck out there with no ride home. No one would pick up a hitchhiker who looked like I did tonight, covered in mud and filth. I told myself to calm down. If her engine was on, the car was idling and wouldn’t be making that much noise, and my hearing probably wasn’t at all the best in the world. Also, maybe she had turned off the car. I was getting a little more worried. If she was listening to music loud enough to drown out the sound of my voice, then I should be able to hear the music too.

“Perry! Sorry baby. Hello?”

If she had gotten angry with my last words to her... We had sorted out arguments before and she had never left me stranded anywhere, never left in the middle of an argument at all. It was usually me who got fed up with arguing and went to cool off. She would happily finish any argument, anywhere, anytime.

“She’s in her car, mad, and ignoring you,” I said to myself. I almost believed it until I realized I had shouted for help. She might have angrily ignored her name, but she would not ignore my cries for help, I knew at least that much. I had to have been gone at least five minutes at that point.

I decided to postpone worrying and figure out a way to get out of this ditch. I looked around me as though I could see, before remembering that I couldn’t. There’s often a bunch of junk or trash in the wash. I would have to find stuff to stack up and climb out with. I would also have to find any climbing implements using my hands and not my eyes. This would not be pretty and it would not be quick.

Here goes. I got down on my hands and knees and started feeling around in the dark. I realized that there were some dry spots and some wet spots, so any times my hands encountered wetness, I moved in a different direction to stay out of the muck. I had to favor my knee abrasion, and move slowly. I found a decent sized boulder, about the size of my head, and took it over to the side of the wash and set it down, making sure that it was touching both the dirt ground and the concrete.

I went back out again and found what I guessed to be an old paint can that someone had carelessly thrown into the wash. I stood up to take it back and that is when I noticed the light in the distance. The orange light. Fire. It was very far off, just a flicker, and almost unnoticeable, even in the near pitch blackness. It seemed to be about level with me, so it was in the drainage ditch with me, and not above.

Fire. That’s a dangerous thing in California. The state is, of course, known for wildfires. Sure, it has its share of earthquakes and floods, even an occasional landslide, but wildfires are far more common and I can’t even remember a year going by without major, catastrophic fire occurring to kill a few people and do millions of dollars in property damage. Authorities have progressively gotten more and more anal about allowing fires, even campfires, and it has really gotten to the point where you need a permit, and you need to be in a designated campsite, with a preexisting fire pit, to even have a fire. In some counties, you are not even allowed to do that. Some local laws in certain areas won’t even allow people to have a small fire on their own property, permit or not.

I tossed the paint can over to where I guessed I left the boulder and then decided to think this out for a few seconds. There is no legal camping in the wash, that would be ridiculous to assume that it’s a legitimate campground. No legal fires either. So, whoever had lit it was doing something illegal. That didn’t bother me much. If you are too stupid to have any common sense, then California is the perfect place to live, as the government loves to nitpick and create a large number of laws disallowing things. Just because someone has an illegal fire, doesn’t mean that they are any sort of threat. Someone with half a brain can maintain a campfire without lighting the rest of the world on fire.

I decided it was probably homeless people. It was winter, and if you’re going to be homeless in winter, California is the place to do it, although winter hadn’t really come anywhere this year...yet, most people were still expecting it to arrive at some point.

Why do they even need a fire? It’s ninety degrees out. There’s more to a fire than warmth, of course. It’s nice to be able to see your surroundings at night, it gives a nice ambience, and it’s really relaxing, almost hypnotic and romantic to look at. Often in my life, I have let myself get lost as I gaze into, and through, a nice campfire.

Well, I decided that I could try piling up rocks and random garbage, and that could conceivably take hours or I could go investigate the fire. If there was a tended fire ahead, someone lit it, and it seemed that they probably knew of a quicker way out that attempting to get up a slimy incline. It was probably the best bet.

At that moment, I heard another car coming. Well, I wasn’t going to waste the headlights this time. I also had opted not to scream at the top of my lungs.

“Perry,” I tried halfheartedly, one more time, at a moderate volume. No answer ensued.

The space above me, where I knew the ground level to be, slowly started to light up as the vehicle got closer. A shape started to emerge, quite close to where I came down, and near to where I was going to build a ladder of random junk for my escape. By a shape, I mean a silhouette, of course. As the car got closer, I realized that there was a tree there. Of course there was. I remembered that I had brushed up against some low branches before I had fallen down.

I immediately started to make my way back toward the tree. The last thing I noticed was that the branches hung very low, like a willow tree. I couldn’t see below the edge of the wash, but they seemed to at least make it down the ground, and the thing seemed to be right on the edge of the wash. If they reached the ground, maybe they even went lower, off the edge, into the ditch.

The car drove past and my world slipped into darkness again, but I continued on toward where I knew the tree was. Suddenly, I stepped on something that wasn’t exactly solid, it gave a little under my foot, then moved on its own accord.

“Ssssssss,” a definite hissing sound occurred near the ground and I jumped back.

It had to be a snake, but it didn’t bite. I stood still and listened closely, but didn’t hear another hiss, and more importantly, I didn’t hear a rattle, which would have been scarier. Getting bitten by a non-venomous snake can really hurt, but nowhere near as badly as getting bitten by a rattlesnake. A rattlesnake cannot usually kill a healthy adult human, but when that poison flows through your veins, there are few things that can be more excruciatingly painful.

After a few moments, I continued forward slowly. I didn’t lift my feet up, but shoved them along the ground, and I pushed them along, not breaking contact with the soil, pushing into a snake would make it far less aggressive than stepping on it, at least that’s what I hoped would occur.

I made my way back to where I had been earlier, feeling the stone I had set down, while exploring forward slowly and softly with my feet. I lifted my hands up in the air and started feeling around blindly for any low hanging branches of the tree. There was nothing. I moved to my right and did it again, forward, back to each side a little, arms outstretched to feel for anything. After some time, I moved farther to my left to repeat the process.

“Ssssss,” the sound came from behind me. I almost looked, but realized that there was no point in even trying to as the darkness was complete. I remained motionless for a couple seconds, then proceeded to search with my fingers for any low hanging appendages from the tree, carefully sliding my feet along the ground when I switched positions, instead of lifting them.