Fern Canyon

something that happened last month

My wife will steal ferns from any forest. She doesn’t give a shit. So you can imagine how she felt when we went into the Fern Canyon. This is a beautiful canyon in Northern California and not only is it full of ferns, it’s teeming with influencers. I’m not saying that anyone should want to reduce the influencing population in the United States, but if they did, a good idea would be to block the exits to the fern canyon, wait for the influencers to fill the canyon, close up the entrance, and then (making gentle use of a megaphone) inform the influencers that Mr. Beast demands a fully lethal battle royale and that the winner (lone-survivor) will receive a lifetime supply of Ozempic and CBD-infused yoga pants. In less than twelve hours, that particular crop of influencers would have sadly perished. At the end of a week, the trickling stream through the canyon and the purifying labors of the ferns would have dealt with much of the blood and viscera. Time would work the blemished canyon like a 19th century washerwoman scouring a splotch of mustard off a cravat.

My wife was desperate to steal ferns from the famous canyon. She developed a psychosomatic fever of 103° in anticipation. When we entered the state park containing the canyon, the fever broke and she started sweating like a pig.

(I am aware that my wife may not appreciate being compared to a pig and may not even like that I’m describing her sweating in any quantity at all, but there’s just not another adequately intense phrase to invoke how much she started sweating when her fever broke at the scent of ferns growing thick in the air. Another contributing factor: the A/C on her side of our car has been broken for more than five years and would cost us over 600 USD to repair. The air on her side still kind of functions, by which I mean it blows very hot air. So in order for the rest of us to be cool, she has to have engine heated air blown mostly in her face. One thing you could do to help my wife sweat at least less like a pig is to become a paid subscriber to my substack so I can afford to fix the A/C.)

In the canyon, my wife darted from wall to canyon wall. She basked in the air-purifying qualities of these ferns. She tromped through the stream and the pools of crystalline water. She stole hundreds of ferns.

I had to move more carefully. I don’t have shoes or sandals that accommodate tromping into pools and streams. My feet (bravely) defy standard shoes by being too wide and too thick with too much arch. My feet do not play by the prescriptive “rules” set by an alienating shoe industry. And most outdoor sandal manufacturers shape the arch of their footwear so rigidly that if the arch of my foot doesn’t perfectly match the intense arch of their sandal (which it never does), the high point in the rubber arch lands awkwardly, almost fully on the ball of my foot. Untenable. So I wore shoes that prevented my easy movement into cool canyon streams. I wore shoes with socks.

My wife slipped past influencers, over logs. I concentrated on my foot placement, lumbered. I picked my steps like a learning-disabled mountain goat. My limber wife squeezed between two pony-tailed Instagram models, narrowly avoiding the ample hazard of their swollen botoxlips, and I lost her. I sped up, keeping my eyes on my feet. I jumped from rock to log to rock to pebbled solid ground. I watched my feet doing all this, pretty much on auto-pilot, my awareness overseeing rather than controlling. I hopped again from rock to shore, bent at the knees, head lowered, and then straightened upright and smashed the living hell out of the top of my head on a fallen tree, diagonal across the path, high end leaned against the canyon wall.

I rebounded from the impact, and stepped back into the stream, soaking my shoes, zeroing out my effort. I felt sick at once. Nauseated. My hat slid off my head, askew from the impact, and I reached up and felt a jagged flap of skin at the roots of my hair, blood on my fingers.

God did something interesting when He made blood red. I don’t mean to make it sound like God doesn’t usually do interesting things. Like, “way to finally come up with something interesting, big guy.” From a scientific materialist perspective the redness of blood is arbitrary. We perceive the color “red” as a warning because we need to react to the sight of blood because we really need to know if we’re bleeding because we’re probably going to have to do something about it. And “nature” auditioned various colors of blood. Certain lizards have green blood, sea cucumbers bleed yellow. And, according to scientific materialism, after trial and error, the “universe” landed on red blood for most vertebrates. But that’s not how it works. God decided that blood would be red because that’s fundamental to both redness and blood. The point is when you look at your own blood on your fingers (or really anyone’s), you’re having a profound encounter with core reality, a visitation from an awful angel.

“Aaaaa-bbBBY,” I said in a surprising crescendo. My wife’s name is Abby. I staggered through the crystalline pools of water like a learning-disabled mountain goat with significant, brain damaging head trauma. People (if we’re ready to call influencers “people”) looked at me. I put my hat back on and lowered my bloody hand because I guess I didn’t want the influencers to have an important experience with core reality on account of my blood. I suppose that’s just for me.

I got more control of my voice. “Hey, Abby!” I said in a cool way, like I wanted her to look at something, like I had found the perfect fern to steal. I know now that I had just bonked my head on a log and cut my scalp somewhat. But at that moment, I was having several reactions at the same time. I didn’t know if I had perhaps sustained an important, life-altering concussion, one that would cause my already low IQ (~85) to drop into lower-invertebrate range. I didn’t know if this bonk had disfigured my scalp in ways that would undermine my future as an influencer. I didn’t know if my next eight hours would revolve around me being driven to a hospital in civilization, sitting in a waiting room, getting stitches and a CT scan, waiting for results, dying.

My wife pushed through the hordes of influencers. I showed her the blood on my hand. She looked at the wound on my scalp. “Uhh, I can barely see it,” she said.

“I feel kind of dizzy,” I said. She had turned away, looking around for ferns to steal. I had to say it again.

“Do you want some water or something?” she said, eyes darting from fern to fern.

I found her complete lack of interest comforting.