Minor Revenge

Got home, opened my bags, and found I was not the first person to open them that day. I had that little white love letter from the TSA in both duffels, and I must admit, after the pointless disgust at the pantomime dumb show of it all--oh, yeah, we all feel so much safer now--I had to feel sorry for whoever opened the bags. I mean, okay, so the job is better than working fast food, but not by a whole lot.

So I thought about it: you wake up, put on the white shirt, go to the airport. A couple big, black bags are slid aside for further inspection--was this while they were checking the spike on the tip of my cane, not that amused by the fact that it was covered only by a wine cork?--and you pull the zip.

And then the smell hits.

Now, my brother, who lives in Korea and travels more than I do, says he always puts his dirty clothes on top, just in case this happens to him. But that wasn't my intent. Truly. It's just that I had nothing but dirty clothes at this point.

The pants stained when I slid down a hill in Vuntut; the shirts caked with bug spray; the fleece that I used for a pillow every night, then wore during the cold mornings; the capriline that could almost stand up on its own by the time I got it home.

I was in the arctic. Even washing clothes in the river didn't help, because the river was full of silt, and the clothes that have not yet made it from the pile in the living room to the washer out back glint with a silver, silicate light.

There's an old Richard Brautigan bit, "The Last of My Armstrong Creek Mosquito Bites," in which he points out that "you can't keep everything. You'd run out of room."

But there are things I'd like to keep. Fear of memories washing down the drain, literally. There are many different kinds of souvenirs, and I have to wonder: once the scent is gone, once the feel of foreign textures is washed out, will it be harder and harder to keep the thought of the delicate wings of the arctic alpine butterfly, a startling brown against the gold and red of the tundra?

What about the sound of a seagull coming in through the skylight at 3 AM?

Maybe I'll wait another day to finish washing the clothes.