Splash
I dropped my phone in the toilet this morning. I had not yet flushed the toilet from overnight activity. I’ve been trying to limit my liquid intake near bedtime but there is always overnight activity. Like me, my urinary tract is forty-six-years-old. Components are wearing down, getting creaky. I have to accept it like I have to accept my President ordered my military to bomb Iran over the weekend. These are not choices I have made but I have to live with them because I am American. I can say “not my president” but he is still my president.
Before dropping my phone in the toilet, I had been lingering in bed on Instagram. I was having a pleasant exchange with a stranger from South Carolina who commented on my comment on the subject of Great Lakes vs. oceans on a Midwest fan page. Yes, a Midwest fan page exists on Instagram. I won’t say Midwesterners have glacial chips on their shoulders for living our flat, landlocked existence. It’s just that everyone outside of the Midwest expects us to despise prairie living. Maybe those Illinoisans and Michiganders with “Salt Life” stickers on the back of their cars do despise prairie living. As someone who left and returned, I wonder how they’d feel if they actually lived on the coast. Living on the edge is different from visiting it.
The Instagram stranger had commented something like “We got the Chinese spy balloon and you got the Edmund Fitzgerald.” I cackled in my pajamas reading the comment because my family had been at the beach the day the bus-sized Chinese spy balloon graced Myrtle Beach with its presence. My husband’s father and stepmother were visiting us from Michigan where they built a custom home on a lovely, not-Great Lake. We took them to the fishing pier at Myrtle Beach State Park despite the cool weather because we are Midwestern and so are they—we don’t mind cool weather. Aside from that and our name, we have very little in common. There were plenty of spots in the parking lot when we arrived because February is a slower month for visiting state parks in coastal South Carolina. Some folks with binoculars were looking in the same direction at something in the sky. We did not immediately remember the Chinese spy balloon from the news. I wondered what could be out there, maybe a roseate spoonbill? I looked in the direction the binoculars were pointing and there it was, though it didn’t look like much. A boring white blob blobbing every-so-slowly out over the ocean. I wouldn’t have guessed it was bus-sized if I hadn’t heard it on the news
Holy shit, we had stumbled upon the scene of a newsworthy event.
My in-laws grumbled criticism about the then-government of the United States. I overheard many others at the scene grumbling about the then-government of the United States, hoods up to block the wind, sunglasses on to protect their eyes from still-bright cloudy skies. People were angry we had let the balloon blob across the country without shooting it down. I wanted to shout DOES NO ONE CARE THAT SOMEBODY’S GRANDMOTHER/UNCLE/DAUGHTER/ETC. COULD BE SMASHED BY THE BALLOON? I did not shout. I just wandered away with my husband. Our group splintered into two grandparents, two parents, and two young adult sons, passing as we walked in and out of the warm gift shop with its bait and fishing supplies, up and down the pier, chatting every so often as the parking lot filled with people who had heard a crowd was gathering at Myrtle Beach State Park to watch the Chinese spy balloon drift out over the ocean. We could have left. Maybe we should have left. Even I couldn’t look away. After all, I am the kind of person who sits on the toilet with my phone in hand.
It was surreal when jets appeared in the sky. We could hear them and see them though what we heard and saw was delayed by the vast distance between us and them. My husband and older son and I had watched the Blue Angels perform at an air show in South Dakota years earlier but that was a spectacle for the sake of spectacle, nothing like this. This was an actual military operation and we were watching it with our very own eyes.
We saw the balloon implode before we heard it and the gathered crowd began chanting “USA USA USA.” I took a video to capture the audio. I did not join in the chanting. I could not, even though I was overwhelmed with awe. I was also shocked, couldn’t catch my breath. Awestruck, yes. Proud and/or patriotic, no. Don’t get me wrong (please don’t get me wrong) I am grateful to soldiers for their willingness, their practice, their skill. We have created a world in which countries must defend themselves with military and that requires willing, practiced, skillful individuals. Jets maneuvered brilliantly through the sky thanks to soldiers coordinating with precision in the air and on the ground. Their sweat under uniforms harnessed carefully into those machines or seated in front of screens had to smell different than basketball sweat or kayaking sweat or even my own, shocked spectator sweat. I was also paralyzed with fear. The target had been an unmanned, bus-sized surveillance balloon, now wilted and hurtling in pieces toward the Atlantic ocean. Pelicans diving for fish make a splash. What do you call it when bus-sized spy equipment hits the water’s surface after a rapid descent from being blown up? Sploosh? Boosh? Jesus Christ?
When I took my phone to the toilet because I wanted to sustain the joy of connecting with a stranger from a place I had once lived who witnessed the same event from almost the same place, I never dreamed I would drop it in the toilet. I was helpless when the phone left my hands. It was going into the toilet. I couldn’t stop it. There was a splash before I snatched it out from the yellow liquid and ripped the case off. That was definitely a splash and an Are You Fucking Kidding Me?
I decided to leave my phone in the bathroom for the day. It is one of those newer ones that is fairly waterproof. Pissproof too, I imagine. I think it will be fine but I am just so disgusted. It’s amazing what humans are capable of, the extraordinary ways we have created to communicate and connect. My goodness, how gross we can be, too. Inattentive, self-absorbed, irrational. I think I’m a better human without the phone but if I can’t even part with it to empty my bladder, am I resigned to being a worse human? I like to think I’m “better” because I don’t chant “USA” and I don’t celebrate American bombs blasting Iran. Outside of America, I am not better, because at the end of the day, I am an American living in America and I feel helpless to do anything but watch things already in motion make their way into the toilet and, maybe, write about the experience.
