The first time I was scared of dying

The first time I was really scared of dying, I was nine years old.  It happened in one fleeting moment, I felt it in my stomach and it traveled on a breath up into my chest and then crept up into my throat and sat there like a frightened rodent.  It happened at summer camp; it was in my first year as a Boy Scout, and I was as green as the canvas army platform tents that we slept in.  Alot of my time had been spent alone growing up, I walked in the woods alone, crawled under people's porches alone, tried to smoke leaves out of bamboo alone.  This was new.  Summer camp is social, everyone is sharing a similar sentiment of activity, and group activity is touted at these places.  

The first night, my bunkmate and I dug a trench around our tent, a moat really.  We were kings, and we needed to be protected from the inevitable flash flood that would threaten our thrones.  We disregarded the fact that the tents were constructed on platforms for a reason.  At about a foot deep and eight inches wide, this trench was not much to look at, but we recognized it as a modern marvel of engineering.  Besides, no one else in our troop had thought to dig a trench to fend off the muddy waters of a late summer thunderstorm.  That made us visionaries, at the ripe age of nine.

When the trench was done, we sat by the fire with fat marshmallows and pointed sticks carved with dull blades.  Most kids never had the patience to roast the puff, and instead would cram them into their mouths two at a time, like tiny white memory foam pillows.  One of the rich kids in the troop had actually brought a memory foam pillow to camp, which I thought was strange at the time.  He was older, and had a lot of colorful and new-smelling equipment:  a turquoise and black and yellow sleeping bag that he said would keep you warm at absolute zero, a hard plastic lockbox for his personal items, seemingly indestructible with it's black and gray exterior and red clamps to keep it closed.  He also had brought a wet suit, dark green with cobalt blue lines accentuating all of the seams.  It seemed to me that these lines would only highlight his weak spots to a killer shark if he wore the suit in the ocean, striping up his soft side and up under the armpit, following the soft white skin on the inside of his thighs and tracing his majors arteries on opposite points of the neck trunk up behind the ears.  I scoffed at his ignorance, but I couldn't understand why he had brought a wet suit to summer camp.  It took some courage to ask loudly across the quiet fire, especially when addressing one of the older guys in the troop.  I was almost certain he would reply with a dripping remark on how stupid I was to not have realized why he would bring such an obviously essential piece of equipment to summer camp, and I wasn't disappointed.

"Uhh, because of the scuba diving class, duh.  You need to learn how to read you little ewok."

Some of the older guys in the troop had started calling me an ewok, since apparently I resembled one of the small hairy creatures from the Star Wars installment, Return of the Jedi.  I had bleached my hair blond earlier in the summer along with the rest of my baseball team, and it had been growing out for a while, so I guess I looked like an ewok.  I didn't know.  

I asked with caution, "Where do they do the scuba diving class?  The lake?"

"No kid, they do it in the pool cause it's clear and everyone can see how to do it."

"How to do what?  It's just breathing with a tank underwater."  I didn't understand yet in my life that everything was a process.

Mr. Memory Foam laid it out for me at this point, with more than a hint of exasperation in his tone.

"Ah, alright, listen.  If you read the activity book, you'd know this, but the scuba class is kinda like a SWAT team thing.  It's not just about flippering around underwater with a breathing thing.  You throw all of your gear down into the pool, let it sink to the bottom, and then jump in with all of your clothes on." 

"Shoes too!" Someone to my right chimed in.

"Yea, shoes too, and then you swim down to the bottom of the pool, it's like 15 feet or something.  When you get to the bottom, you gotta take all your clothes off, except it's not like getting undressed before bed, everything is really heavy cause you're underwater, and your head hurts real bad cause you're so far down.  All the counselors watch from the side of the pool to make sure you do everything right.  Once you get your clothes off, you have to put the wetsuit on, and then put the tank on yer back, goggles on yer face, and the respirator in your mouth.  Then you gotta turn everything on, make sure it's working right, and blow all of your air out before you take a breath from the tank.  You gotta be able to hold your breath for like, two minutes or something like that.  I saw some kid do it last year, but he was older than me.  If I do it this year, I'll be the youngest to ever do it."  He smiled real big at this last sentence, revealing a little chip in his front top tooth.  

Another kid my age added his two cents, a bit too loud for the late night.

"Yea, I heard from a guy in another troop that," he was so excited that he could barely continue the sentence,"that, that a kid drowned one year trying to do it.  He fainted underwater, and the lifeguards didn't know cause he didn't float to the top cause the air tank was so heavy and also cause he was like 16 and they thought he would be fine doing it."

I thought about this for a second, and looked at the embers socializing in the bottom of the fire.  I was too close to the fire, and my face felt hot, like the little blond hairs on my forehead were melting into my skin.  I didn't mind the heat; I imagined how cold the water was when you had to hold your breath for a really long time, and how the pressure of that cold water pushed the air up and out of your lungs and you floated there helpless until you couldn't do anything but frantically kick towards the surface, thinking that any second your lungs might explode like two hydrogen blimps.  I swam alot during the summer, but most of my experiences holding my breath had been alone in the bathtub.  I would lie on my back, and slide down in the water with my mouth below the water, and my nose above, and then I'd pinch my nose between my index finger and my thumb, just in case I panicked, all I'd have to do was let go, like holding a live hand grenade with sniper rifles trained on my head.  Just let go, and everything will be OK.  

I wondered if anyone else around the fire was scared of drowning, but I couldn't ask.  It was against the law in our troop.  If you ever openly admitted to having fear, you were immediately labeled a pussy, and would no longer be asked to go on late-night missions in the woods, that is if you would have been asked to go on them in the first place.  I didn't want to be a pussy.  I wanted to be the youngest kid to make it through the scuba class.  A giant log fell off of the fire, and all of the sudden, it was much darker, and everyone stopped talking and watched as the log flickered outside of the ring with small red and orange dots of flame, scales like a fat burning snake.  My thoughts of the fame and glory I'd achieve through completing the scuba class floated my body off to my tent, and I mumbled goodnight to everyone around the fire as I wafted away.  

Inside the vaulted tent, curled in my sleeping with my hand clutching my penis, I thought about my mom.  She would be at home right now, probably not thinking about me, probably reading fat book with a dramatic cover and typeface, smoking cigarettes and drinking cheap white wine.  It was my first night away, and the differences fell onto my chest like an anvil.  My eyes adjusted to the dark quickly, and I saw a large, unidentifiable bug hunkering in the top corner of the tattered tent.  I wasn't worried, but I thought, this bug wouldn't be in my room at my house at home where I live.  Dad would have squished it with a paper towel a while ago.  He hates bugs.  I didn't hate bugs.  I just wondered if they acknowledged my own presence, if they wondered why I was there as much as I would wonder why they were there.  I began to drift off into sleep, my hand still between my legs, my brain showing me images of myself with a horribly mismatched front tooth and a ballooned chest.  I jolted myself awake to escape these images.  The giant bug was gone, probably walking around in the woods killing things.  I comforted myself with this idea.  The thought of being stuck underwater without an immediate escape was eating at me, this jumpy feeling of excitement in my stomach; it felt like a small terrier was inside of my stomach, yipping and snapping and bouncing up and down in the air, but it wasn't a happy terrier.  It was slowly ripping out my guts, one tube at a time, until it became an apple core of pain just above my belly button.  If I drowned, would they call my parents?  Or would they take my body and throw me into the lake, or even worse, roll me out into the woods and lay me on the crackle-leaf ground with the giant killer bug that hungrily exited my tent in anticipation of my passing?  I didn't know these things, I was too young, and I knew I was too young to know.  I wasn't scared of much, this I knew for a fact.  If my flashlight conked out in the woods at night, I wasn't scared, my eyes would adjust and I would be OK.  If I was caught in a thunderstorm in a large open field, I wasn't scared of getting hit by lightning, I would just break for the tree line.  If I came across a black bear in the woods, I wouldn't be scared, I would open my backpack and offer him some blackberry jam because I would know how much bears like jam.  The water though, the water was different.  Being in it wasn't bad, but being beneath all of those pounds of pressure, like holding the ocean on your back, that scared me.  The water eventually would enter my body, if I couldn't hold my breath long enough.  It would enter my body through my mouth, and throw my ears and through my nose and even through the spaces around my finger and toe nails.  I would look up through the distortion, and see flat fat people refracted on the edges of the concrete pool, I would see as they decided that I wasn't going to make it, and I would watch them walk away slowly, giving up on me.  I would be trapped, and they would be walking off to the mess hall to eat breakfast for dinner, cardboard french toast with water syrup, stiff sausage logs and eggs that looked like something you might win in a claw grab game at a family fun spot.  I would sit on the bottom of the pool by myself, in all of my clothes until my head caved in from the pressure.  There would be no blood, only water, because the water would have already entered my body.  The water would mix with the other water, and then my body would slowly fade away, and I would become part of the water.  The whole time this would be happening, I would have a white hot pain in the front of my forehead, and my chest would feel like there were a thousand hummingbirds inside, frantically trying to escape, since hummingbirds do not like water, only nectar and flowers.  I would be at the bottom, 15 feet down, all alone except for the hummingbirds, and I would feel sorry for myself, because no one would ever find my body, or tell my mom what happened, or make sure that the trench that I dug was working when that last thunderstorm of the summer came, even though the tents were built on platforms for this reason alone.  This was my first rational fear of dying, at the ripe age of nine.