We’ve arrived: until I can say these words to myself—and to my wife—the end of the trip might as well be years away. Accidents, breakdowns, wrong turns—they all stood in the way of the mouthing of that final phrase.
But, finally, it is over. The trip has worn us down with the bright heat, steering the roller coaster roads around the steep coastal hills while craning our necks to try to gather all of the sylvan vistas of seashores and farmlands, the driving on the odd side of the road. We unstick our bare thighs from the plastic seats and unfold our bodies from their contorted shapes, exhaling sounds of relief and rescue as we stretch our stiffness out. We step onto the gravel parking area: brown and gray pebbles stuck in a stew of tan silt. The ocean breeze reaches out to us from the east and soothes our sweaty skin. The hotel looks inviting: pastels on wood, quaint but not to the point of archaic, overlooking the blue Pacific on New Zealand’s North Island. Are there adventures to be had here, stories that we will relish telling again and again to our friends back in the States, withholding the punch lines until they burst from us?
“I’m going to run to the bathroom,” I say to my wife across the red-hot top of our black rental car. I trot to the office and grab the handle and jerk, my lower muscles already preparing to release the flood.
“What the . . . ? I say as my hand drops from the locked office door. A taped hand-written note glares at me, hastily scribbled in penciled block letters on a wrinkled sheet torn from a bound notebook: “Be back in 2 hours.”
“Two hours from when?” I scream, looking back at my wife, who was just coming up to the door after disengaging herself from the car.
Her eyes plead with me to calm down. “Well, we can visit the beach for a while, and then check in later.”
“I can’t wait, I have to go NOW. My world is tinted yellow,” I say, as I begin to walk around to the back of the building.
“Where are you going?”
“I said I have to go now, so I am going to piss around back.”
“You can’t do that! There are rooms in the back, too. Someone will see you,” she says, intentionally falling behind, hoping this lack of support will cause me to reconsider my trip to embarrassment.
“It’s either I go now or I pee my pants,” I say, continuing at a trot.
I look around as I enter a sunny desert between the two buildings, rejecting a flowerbed alive with cantaloupe-colored calla lilies and purple gentian, and a dumpster den that smells of rotten fish and cooking grease. I settle on a kidney-shaped rock garden around a towering Norfolk Pine: an oasis of lazy, rounded beach rocks interspersed with pebbles, clean and neat, baked white by the sun. As I take my stance, my wife trudges around the corner, shielding her eyes from the glare of the sun, and plants herself across the rock garden from me. She looks me in the eye and says, “I can’t believe you are doing this!” Her face goes from irritation to resignation as my stream breaks free, the yellow liquid steaming when it hits the rocks. Once the initial rush of relief has passed, I look down to see the rock I am peeing on has words laser-cut letters set in gothic type. The glare off the urine prevents me from reading it. Once finished, I tuck in and bend down to examine the drowned rock. It says: “PLEASE TURN ME OVER.” Click—my “adventure-o-meter” registers movement.
“What does that mean?” says Anna, beginning to move closer, her pique giving way to curiosity.
“Flip it over and let’s find out,” I say.
Not me! It’s your pee.”
“Okay,” I reply, as I flip the rock over with the toe of my brown leather sandal, a collage of potential images forming in my head.
She reads the three words cut into its back surface one at a time, like she is translating from another language: “AHH, THAT’S BETTER.” She looks at me with a mischievous glint in her eye and says, “Now, who’s going to tell this story?”
mgeisser
