Duck, Duck, Good Luck with That

Apache Junction, Arizona

Do you ever think about the stories your parents told you when you were little? And how those stories effected the person you are today?

I think about it all the time.

But this story isn’t about me and my childhood traumas. It’s about the stranger’s that I overheard while I was camping outside Phoenix.

It’s midday in April

And it’s too hot.

Whatever you imagine “too hot” to be, I’m sure what I’m sitting through is worse. Technically, I’m lying. In a hammock in my shady canopy trying to move as little as possible to avoid exerting any unnecessary energy.

My campsite is decent. There’s a view of some mountains, and it has some shrubs and rocks going for it. But it’s packed. To get any real privacy I’d have to drive deeper into the site. And it’s not fair to put my car house through that dirt road every time I go into town. So I’m a few minutes in from the gate and sharing a hill with a trio – two men and a woman.

From what I can tell, they live out here.

Their set up is too established for the max 14 day stay, and they leave every day to go to work. Plus, on my first day here I meet a woman who lives out here. She tells me rent’s too high in the city so she’s forced to camp on public land to avoid being “homeless”.

And to paint an even better picture, they have very southern accents. The kind of accents people dramatized in movies with a tumbleweed in the background.

I don’t like to eavesdrop, but I can’t help it when I’m in the middle of nowhere and it’s quiet and my neighbors like to yell in funny accents.

It's still hot

But luckily (thanks to Mountain Man #2) I have my joint to help me survive the midday heat. I’m high, lying, swinging when

I overhear one of the most off-putting stories I’ve heard in a long time

It’s the woman. She’s sharing what her dad said to her when she was five years old.

She’s sitting at the dinner table when her dad puts her plate in front of her and tells her that he cooked Donald Duck (assumingly one of her favorite cartoons). The girl is appalled. She refuses to eat, but the dad insists. Downright forces her to finish her food or face punishment.

So here she is,

eating her animated friend to avoid getting in trouble while her dad’s having a good laugh. How else can you explain an adult saying that kind of lie to a child?

Then, a few days later, the girl sees Donald Duck on tv. How can he be on tv if she ate him for dinner the other night?

Not to worry. The dad has the perfect excuse. He tells her that she’s watching reruns from when he used to be alive.

How sick and twisted do you have to be to keep up this lie?

To a child.

And that's the story. I immediately empathize with the woman, but the two men she's with don't get it. The woman retells parts of the story and then further explains how she felt “eating Donald Duck”.

She felt terrible. Clearly.

How else could you explain the anguish in her voice when she was telling the story? But sometimes I have too much faith in people and their empathizing capacity.

Now she’s an adult (at least in her 30’s), and she's describing something to friends that happened decades ago with such emotion, it might as well have happened last week. And I’m high wondering if her dad’s the reason why she’s living out in the desert with two men, no AC, and rattlesnakes.

What could her life have been if she hadn’t become a friend-eating monster at the age of 5?

When did she finally figure out the lie?

Regardless, it was too late. We’ll never know what her life could have been.