Escaping Beaver Trapper

Last week I wrote a short story that is quite a departure for me. It is not YA, not an eco-adventure, and not fiction. Sunday, at the Writers' Guild prose reading series at Box Car Books, I read my new auto-biographical story about two experiences I had over four decades apart. My audience was enthusiastic. I hope you enjoy it, too.

Escaping Beaver Trapper

I’ve never thought of myself as a daredevil. I’m a bookworm and story junkie. But on reflection, that’s me being naïve about my own behavior. To be honest, I have a history of recklessness, of running a little too fast with danger.

It can start so innocently, with a positive mindset of confidence and joy. But, anyone who’s ever ridden a seductive, well-tuned road bike on a glorious May day in quarry country knows how quickly you can pick up speed just coasting downhill.

I just couldn’t slow down fast enough.

Slow down fast enough? Is that an oxymoron?

There was an extreme sharp turn at the bottom. Slow down. Slow down. Slow down!

When I left the road, inertia and physics took over. I flew over the handlebars and landed on my right hip. That part of my body bruised, but didn’t break.

As a youngster, I rode wild, but bounced back from every tumble and scrape. Nothing a little Mercurochrome couldn’t fix. Gosh that stuff stung. It’s a wonder I didn’t develop mercury poisoning before that antiseptic was banned. How did we ever survive?

Then when I hit the danger years of puberty, I wasn’t particularly attracted to the gang of hoods who smoked behind the cafeteria during lunch break, so I avoided that trap. I was an A student, and no one seemed to suspect what the student council kids were really up to: A little political graffiti here; a little guerilla theater there. All for a good cause, and we never got caught.

The summer after my first year in college, I spent time catching up with my daring and clever high school gang. They’d all stayed in Texas, while I’d gone to a small liberal arts college in the Pacific Northwest. So I rode with a carload of my friends to Austin to see what I was missing at the big university. We shared stories: My seminar dinners at faculty homes. Their impersonal lecture halls of 300 or more. True, Austin was a very hip city, still is, far sexier than Tacoma, but the U.T. dorms smelled like a locker room. I was pretty sure I’d made a good choice. Maybe I wasn’t so clever, after all. My friends were all planning to stay in Austin for their sophomore year, which started 2 weeks earlier than my school. Meanwhile, I’d embarked on the excursion with them, a good 4-hour drive, without a plan for how I would get back to my childhood home north of Dallas.

Although, I don’t remember how much cash I had, it wasn’t enough for bus fare. In 1973, ATMs and debit cards did not exist. But I knew how to hitchhike. Not that I’d ever done it before, but I figured it couldn’t be that hard. Of course, hitchhiking could be dangerous, but I wasn’t aware of any potential danger to the one thumbing a ride. As far as I knew, any danger of hitchhiking was framed around driver safety and being careful about who to pick up. I didn’t look dangerous. It was going to be easy for me to get a ride.

Understand: I’d never been an athlete. It wasn’t a thing for girls in my era, pre-Title IX.  So, at age 60, I was a rookie rider. My attraction to long-distance bicycling is it’s a sport for all ages. The question isn’t, who can I beat? Which is not my competitive style. It’s, how far can I ride today? I trained with a large group of mixed-ages and abilities, everyone cheering each other on, and it was so much fun. I’ve never been in better physical or emotional shape. We rode 65 miles on Saturday, my personal best, some of it through a pelting rainstorm. On Sunday the sky was that perfect robin’s egg blue with cloud puffs scattered around the hilly horizon. We’d ridden almost 50 miles on that fateful day, and we were on our way back to town. I was a little dehydrated, so perhaps my judgment wasn’t the best.

The friendly, old truck driver said he could take me as far as Waco, before he headed west. So I grabbed my rucksack, waved good-bye to my friend Charlie who’d volunteered to get me started, and hopped up into the cab. The weathered cowboy on wheels spit chew and that’s a disgusting habit. Otherwise, the drive was boring enough, and before we made it to Waco the old trucker offered to help me find a ride for the next leg of my journey. He got on his CB radio, saying he had a girl who was looking for transportation to Richardson, north of Dallas.

Remember, before everyone had cell phones, every trucker had a CB radio that connected him to every other trucker within a 25-50 mile range, depending on terrain and weather conditions. And they all had a CB handle, a code name. So after my trucker sent out the request, somebody responded that he’d heard “Beaver Trapper” was headed home, and he lived north of Dallas. The CB crackled, “Maybe he could give the girl a ride.” My driver chuckled, and I couldn’t believe my luck. I didn’t want to be out on the road alone after dark thumbing for a ride. And, as improbable as it may seem, I had no idea the connotation of the CB handle, Beaver Trapper. I wasn’t exactly pure, but I was completely innocent. It was a different era. Texas hill country looked like Mayberry. I’m still shocked at the pervasive acceptance of sexual assault in casual, boasting language.

Going up one particularly steep hill along Popcorn Road, I fell behind. I’d been training with the group long enough that I was able to go the distance, but I was one of the slowest riders. I kept pedaling, though, zigzagging up the hill. I didn’t have to get off and walk! At the top, I didn’t stop to take a break. Everyone else in my group was already climbing the next hill, so I started to coast. I shifted down in preparation, and peddled twice around, not for speed, to get the chain aligned.

Then, I realized just how steep the incline was.  I still don’t know how fast I was going. I knew that gripping brakes suddenly would cause me to lose control, so I squeezed gently, then firmly, doing my best to maintain stability. I had several factors going for me. The road was dry and clear of debris. There wasn’t a car in sight. It was up to me to navigate the hard left turn at the bottom. By the time I got there I’d slowed to about 10 miles an hour, though that’s a guess. I was able to cut a fair diagonal across the oncoming lane, but what I couldn’t see until I was almost on top of the turn was the crown of the road at the bottom, designed for good drainage, not for good two-wheel traction. It came up so fast.

I felt a lightness. Crossing over the crown gave me a little loft and my wheels a little less friction. Did I actually speed up? The last thing I remember is, at least I won’t hit a tree. 

In Waco, the older trucker turned West, while I climbed up into Beaver Trapper’s cab. The seats had clean upholstery and Western art postcards and photos were taped everywhere, some of it pretty good. You know the type: horses, bison, armadillos, and, of course, jack-a-lope cartoons.

This guy— I do not remember his given name. Let’s call him Trapper for short. He was younger than the first trucker. Not as young as me, but not yet 30, and thank heavens he didn’t smoke or chew tobacco. Quite the opposite: he was drenched in male cologne, the wildly popular Brut. In retrospect, given the name of the cologne, I imagine the TV ADs featured a brutish man who claimed his woman in a veiled ode to rape culture. It was suffocating in the cab, so I rolled the window down.

Trapper was funny and easy going in that Texas-good-old-boy sort of way. He had a big mustache and long sideburns. He was a hippy cowboy. So, kinda cool and fashionable for the time. And, it turned out some of the art, the cast bronze sculptures, were his. Really cool! That’s what I thought. I still don’t know if he was truly a sculptor who drove a truck for his day job or if he just gave me the trucker equivalent of “Let me show you my studio,” because soon after we crossed the Trinity River and headed through downtown Dallas, he wanted to take me home for the night to the barn he'd converted to a studio, instead of dropping me off north of the city where I wanted to go. We were still on the interstate going 70 miles per hour. How was I going to get out and get home?  

I don’t remember my short flight over the handlebars. I do remember yelling help. The shock was intense. The pain, insane. But I hadn’t hit my head, I never lost consciousness, and it didn’t take long for the group behind me to catch up. Several guys straddled their road bikes in their spandex, trying to assess how badly I’d been injured. Should they call 911? Meanwhile, I felt e-v-e-r-y-t-h-i-n-g, so apparently I wasn’t paralyzed.

But I couldn’t sit up. I didn’t scream or cry. I didn’t want to scare the youngest rider, a skinny boy about 12. In a classic girl move, I thought about someone else’s fear and protected him over expressing my own pain.          

I was clearly in shock, so I don’t know how long it took for the leader to cycle back to our location. As a long-time rider and professional chiropractor who’d seen plenty of injuries, he knew what to look for. I wiggled my fingers and toes and pushed against him, as he instructed. He didn’t think I’d broken anything because everything worked—good news—and what I was feeling—not good—was apparently overall stun from the body slam. So, instead of calling for an ambulance, they called for another rider to bring a car.

I still couldn’t sit up, but I rolled over on my hands and knees to take the pressure off my back. I remember saying, “This hurts worse than childbirth,” but I still didn’t cry or scream. Instead I talked a blue streak, about all sorts of things, anything to keep my mind off of the pain. The younger boys rode on and I drifted into politics. When I sensed I was making the chiropractor uncomfortable—as in, I’m typically left of Bernie and he’s probably much more conservative—I got quiet. Fiery pain consumed my entire core. More than one car stopped to ask if we needed help. Ironically, we even saw a passing fire truck, but they were all waved on. By that time, when I did ask for help, it was only in my head. Nothing came out of my mouth.

Inside Trapper’s cab I pressed as far to the right as I could go and leaned my head out the window, letting the summer air clear the Brut out of my lungs and whip my long hair into knots. The man was determined to get me deep into the country, where he had studio space and we could have a good roll in the hay. But I didn’t want intimate contact with him, especially not in a damn barn.

He was still barreling down the interstate, and it would have been ugly if we’d had a physical fight and he’d driven off the highway. Not that I was thinking strategically about the situation. I simply went with my only weapon: words. I delivered an onslaught of words, mostly about how if I wasn’t into it, it wasn’t going to be fun for him either. I kept talking louder and louder, and then I started pulling snapshots and postcards off the headliner, throwing the armadillos and roadrunners, one by one, out the window.  That did it. He pulled onto the shoulder, barely coming to a stop, and I jumped into the dust and down the embankment. That’s how I escaped the Beaver Trapper.

After my spectacular bicycle accident my healing journey has been slow. On the outside, the signs of injury were minimal. I barely got a scratch. But, the internal damage? I’m lucky I didn’t end up losing bladder control—permanently—or the capacity for sexual pleasure, because when I fell my L1 vertebrae was partially crushed. Add to that wound: compression fractures in T11 and L3, along with serious strain to the parasympathetic nervous system, internal organs, and surrounding tissues.

For several months I was bedridden. My husband and son helped me to the bathroom, and my only outings were to doctor’s appointments. Once I got the back brace, I tried to get out every once in a while, because the isolation was the worst thing of all, but I hated appearing weak and vulnerable. I lost an inch in height, twenty pounds, and a year-and-a-half.

I called from the payphone across the street from the Baskin and Robbins ice cream shop less than 2 miles from my house, and my stepfather came to pick me up. I just said I got dropped off, and he never asked anything about who’d given me a ride or anything about my trip from Austin. Nobody did. Thinking back, it’s odd that I never talked about Beaver Trapper to anyone. I was ashamed I’d been so stupid.

Then I heard a political candidate brag about grabbing pussy. And soon after a friend told the story of her own rape escape, also at a tender, trusting age. Not that rapists only go for the sweet young things. They also attack nasty old women. So, I’m still not truly safe from the Beaver Trappers of the world.

I have a wonderful healing team. I do physical therapy on my living room floor and in the pool. I’m still regaining core strength and stamina and breaking up scar tissue so my hips swing freely again. When I am vertical, defying gravity, I practice perfect posture to stay out of pain. I really am getting better.

But I still sleep a lot. And I’m still unpacking and dismantling the trauma. My healers tenderly remind me that my body and spirit hold all the traumas of my life, all wound up together, and my parasympathetic nervous system sends clear signals for me to focus on keeping those nerves calm, because my guts still get hijacked by the slightest trigger.  As every old wound surfaces in my mind, from parent neglect to sabotage in the workplace, moments that have previously been lost to my conscious thought, I’m now forced to heal and forgive, and dissolve those scars, too.

I’m so thankful a charming hippy cowboy opened his trap door long enough for me to escape physical assault.

If only I hadn’t been seduced on Popcorn Road by the free flowing wind against my skin on that most glorious afternoon in May.