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KasperSource: The North American Review, Vol. 272, No. 3, Special Heritage Issue: The WomanQuestion, 1849-1987 (Sep., 1987), p. 105Published by: University of Northern IowaStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25124897 .

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I emptied the box and stomped it flat and dragged it into the pasture and burned it. I did not stop shaking for an hour.

The mere recollection of that epi sode, as I lay upstairs in The Jail,

with Jesse's breath and quail song filling the tiny room, was enough to

keep sleep at bay. I remembered sto ries of kids who rubbed their parents the wrong way and got chained up in attics or basements, to age there and die like tethered dogs. I debated

where I would rather be trapped?in an attic, which would be hot in sum

mer, cold in winter, but dry at least, or in a basement, which would keep an even temperature the year round, but

would also be damp and dark and

snaky. The very names for jail musicked through my head. Hoose

gow, calaboose, slammer, stir,

poky, cooler, jug and clink. I remem bered hearing about a slumlord in Los Angeles who, convicted of

neglecting his properties, was sen tenced to live for a month in one of his own tumble-down, rat-infested,

cockroachy tenements. He was fitted with a beeper that would radio the

police if he strayed more than fifty yards from the building. How would it feel, I wondered, to be caught in a

web of electronics? I wondered also about those who imprison them selves. I thought of hermits, shut up in their unlit cells. I thought of

Houdini, that virtuoso of confine

ment, who no sooner escaped than he was begging to be manacled again, wrapped in straitjackets, locked in

cages, buried alive. In short, my can dle of darkness burned with a long

wick.

When I did finally drift off to

sleep, afloat on my trundle bed, there was an edge of panic to my dreams. That first night I dreamed of a black bear slouching through the white cedar swamps of Cape Cod. My bear crawled into caves and hollow logs,

where it stuck fast, or fell into pits, or

tripped snares and went hurtling pawsfirst into the air, or bumbled into

cleverly disguised cages. There was no disguise to the dream. In the

morning, reflecting on this nightmare of entrapment, I was disappointed with my uninventive psyche.

The next day, friends guided us to the ocean

along an obscure path?a

path so obscure in fact that we were not surprised, on looking down from the outermost dune, to see only four other souls on the beach. The tang of

salt raised the hairs on my neck, as if out of the blue the scent of a beast had challenged me. I howled. Dizzied by air and ocean, I was half

way down the dune before I realized that the four souls, each one basking on a towel or blanket, were stark naked. Disturbed by our noisy arrival, like herons roused from their

brooding grounds the sunbathers rose with gestures of indignation and

pulled on their togs and scuffed away over the sand.

Now, as it happens, deep woods and mountain tops and ocean beaches always make me itch to fling off my clothes. Nature in the raw calls to nature in the raw. I usually keep this impulse?and myself?under

wraps. But the itch is there. So I was

sorry to have scared away these innocuous nudists. It is illegal to go

naked on the Cape Cod National Sea

shore?just one more instance of the

government's concern for our wel

fare?although I gather that park rangers, after gazing through bin oculars to make sure of what they are

seeing, warn offenders without

arresting them.

Not all authorities are so indul

gent. Near where I live in southern

Indiana, a young woman was recently hauled into court for sunning in her back yard while wearing only the lower half of a bikini. One of her

neighbors, offended by the specta cle, had called the police, who

September 1987 105

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