Cactus Danger
We were late to the beach. Everyone else was down there. But I wasn’t ready yet and I hate to be rushed. Especially on vacation, because that would be wrong.
So, Walker and I had a quest to find the family because they were down there tossing the Nerf and strolling the surf.
I was new to Kiawah Island and didn’t know how to get to the beach from the house. So we crossed the paved road and found a construction site, a gargantuan mansion being erected from slabs of thick travertine. This monster trophy house sat directly on the beach.
I silently self-congratulated on the cut-through as a two-fer: quality nosy gawkery at the stone mansion going up, and a quicker access to the beach than the public path (a further hike down the road).
We were barefoot, of course. What kind of uptight fool wears shoes at the beach?
When we arrived at the rear of the house we discovered that the new house didn’t really have any sort of pier or boardwalk to the smooth sand, but instead there were small plants and vines growing reluctantly in the dunes.
It looked easy to pick through. And, this was where the decision making went terribly awry.
We weren’t but twenty steps in when Walker, who was picking through in front of me, started to howl.
“Mammmmaaaaa, there is something in my foot! Ow, it hurts. It huuuuuurts!”
No sooner had she yelped this, when my foot was pierced by what could only be an irate porcupine on steroids.
“Holy Fucksicle, that hurt,” I said under my breath.
So, I hopped up to my child on one foot and picked her, balancing the best I could, which was unlikely pretty.
Her foot was bleeding. There were these little cacti balls imbedded therein: two on the top and one underneath and pulling them out was near impossible because they kept biting into my fingers. She’s crying and I’m saying, “Hold on. It’s okay.”
But it wasn’t okay because my hand is bleeding and the cacti are transferring spikes to my fingers and my foot is killing me–suspended in the air. And I’m hopping up and down; to keep my balance because falling would mean that we’re both going be impaled by what I imagine now is a minefield of tiny cacti balls.
I finally manage to extract the cactus on the bottom of her foot and am trying to set her down, but she’s seized up with fear of putting her feet in the sand. And that’s a reasonable fear, but I’ve cleared a little safe patch. I relay this reassurance and set her down and then squat, still balancing on one foot and pull out the top cacti attackers and flick them away.
My hands are filled with spikes, but Walker is de-cactied (you can use this word in the future—you’re so welcome), although still very upset. I pet her hair with my good hand and tell her she’s brave.
“Give me a second, I say” and reach around and pull a large cactus ball from the tender arch of my foot and watch it bleed a bit.
Cacti biting spikes hurt like hell. It’s not something that you think about unless you have a cactus in your yard or you attempt to handle them or you decide to lead your child through a minefield of them. Perhaps, it was not my finest hour in parenting.
I once lived with a cluster of yucca, in my front yard. They bit me regularly, until one day I’d had it and hacked them down and dug up the roots. They came back, of course.
So, there we stand, unshod. We don’t want to go back because we’ve come this far. But we are facing down another 150 feet of spiked dunes to the tide-smoothed beach. I decide that we have to go for it.
I say as much and Walker howls, “nooooo.”
So I say, “I’m going to give you a piggy back ride,” which brings instant relief to her face. I pull her up on my back, all 55 lbs. of gangly child and decide that each step is going to be crucial.
As my decision making up to this point would have it, I immediately step on a cactus with my good foot. And howl. I just can’t risk setting Walker down and so I hoist her up higher and just hop for our lives on the non-cactied foot. Or at least it was for our tender footsies.
It’s not often that I hop. But in a pinch, I’m a very good hopper. Think amputee kangaroo. And I hopped to the non-perilous sand, set Walker down, and investigated my feet. They looked like they were subjected to medieval torture and it took several moments to extract spikes and rub them down with sand to erase the stinging.
We had a little hug of survival-congrats and I apologized. We managed a small laugh when I said that wasn’t the first time I was cack-tacked. She loved “cact-tacked” and I told of other cacti adventures. And we ran to join the fun at the surf and tell our tale of survival and show our foot wounds.
And I promised to take the public route, via the wooden pier, back to the beach house.
And every time thereafter.
I suppose it’s often that there is a good reason why a path is the one less-travelled.
