The most likely to never grow up, grows up.

By Jacob Hibbard

/ Nonfiction /    

By way of an industrial kitchen, they do. On the surface of a green cutting board, with a pile of diced onions, in this plastic bin of mirepoix—they grow up. 

At a faraway truckstop, in the Brooks Mountain Range, as a Piper Navajo lands, beside the Koyukuk river for the first time. And through wet/dry mop technique taught by the truckstop owner who calls days off, personal mission days, believing there is no rest from our living. In stomping empty creamer boxes into flatter rectangles. By basics of burger temping. How thumb and forefinger flesh creates a spectrum. That flipping an egg is more about trust in their wrist than anything. That it was never the owner who was their boss, but a thankless ticket machine spinning orders, dictating where their limbs should go. 

And at the end of each night, they grow up grinding a grill brick against a flattop, extracting a day's cooking that burnt itself to hot steel. In this back and forth motion, by this weight of theirs pressing down, a shrill is born out of friction. A high-pitched dagger to the ear that signals improper mechanics, to apply more lubricating canola oil, or lift the brick slightly to come at it from an angle. It’s a shrill that tunnels inward, meets them at their core, and stays. And nearly three hundred steps from the shrill, they grow up inside of a creek flow, marking a separation between what was and what might be. They wade into what is crisp, what is real, into what is moving, submerging every part of their body into the deeper, colder pools whose impact burrows too and gets inside them, stealing a breath, making space for a slower, quieter, movement of thinking. 

And so they grow up inside of a head space washed out by cold plunges and grill brick shrills, saying aloud to the boreal forest, “I think I will live here for a while.” Which means “I think I will grow up here.” At a faraway truck stop, with no rental agreement, accommodated with a three season tent and access to the communal bathroom where the pubes on the shower floors are not theirs. 

They grow a beard that freezes during winter, but holds inside it a summer of mosquito guts. A beard that is a home for dribble and fumes, for fingers contemplating the whereabouts of a coat hanger to unclog the fryer valve, or when to switch a dirty mop head for a new one, or the question about the effectiveness of oven cleaners, if any exists at all. A beard they carry throughout time, trimmed on occasion for a future interview, or when the lengths cover their face, and their mom, as they return home, begins to search for the child she once knew, saying, “oh, but you have such a handsome face.” 

They grow up inside the inevitable forgetting of where they came from, grew from, became too big for. The space between their mother’s rib cage. Between her dreams and nightmares. A river valley of opposing mountains, where they require nothing but what travels by a tube or a cord. They grow up toward a bright light, pushing through a birth canal, out into the sterilized air of a hospital room. Pulled from their body is a scream. They called this breathing. 

They learn to synthesize oxygen, nutrition and television. How to be a container of feelings and hopes and memory. One month after one month, into a kitchen from a basement, back to a kitchen, to a nursery, where a crib becomes a bed and a baby becomes a boy, they grow up carrying a beard and what it carries—shreds, flecks, drips, smatterings, invisible fragments of things of the past, the fingers of the woman they one day will marry—into their final days of existence, reminded in old pictures what they might look like without it: tame, unseasoned, not grown. Much different from the forest that surrounds them in the industrial kitchen. Separate from the mountains that loom, imprinting them with distance, the image of things unreachable. Protection from the reflection of the face in the mirror that stares back at them, which is them, always them. Something about bare skin and an undefined chin. Something too real, revealing too much, saying matter of factly to their mother one day, to their wife one day, to their son one day: “I’ll always have a beard.” 

So back and forth for a while: One year after one year, from an Alaskan kitchen to a childhood home, back to a kitchen, returning to mom’s potato casseroles, to dad’s floor of gutted computers, returning to mop tiles that sink into melting permafrost, chipping away piece by piece, from the friction of grease-sticky brooms, and the return to the warm embrace of a father, who dances in the backyard to the Counting Crows, and the equally warm embrace of his mother who leaves the house each morning carrying 4 to 5 different bags. Both sound convincing when they say, “stay here for as long as you want.” 

And so wakes suddenly in a childhood bed beside a window that overlooks a badminton net, or in a three season tent to a coworker having sex with another coworker, and instead of waiting for the climax, wanders into the truckstop bone-yard full of gutted engines and left behind vehicles—things that no longer are whole—to gaze at a sky absent of an Aurora Borealis, their feet guiding them to a creek beginning to freeze over, wondering how much more time will pass before it can no longer hold their body. So wakes up suddenly to a history of morning suns, smack dab in the middle of two forevers. 

And they never understand exactly where their roots are, how deep they run, or how far they spread. What touches what, entangles, becomes united or what they really disconnected from in the first place. And so grows up with the recurring feeling of having not grown up at all, or at least, having not grown in the way they were meant to, which has something to do with owning patio furniture, or Tuesday morning trash pick up, which more or less has something to do with a car that warms up in the morning, and a fenced in yard where a leash keeps a pug to a tree who grabs a turd with its mouth to carry around like a cigar. Of abiding to specific modes of communication and knowing when to be silent, or listening more. Which has something to do with the erosion of old friendships, the coming and the going of new ones. Empty space on phonelines, silences in shared spaces, a repetition of returns, the back and forth grill brick as it dissolves into hot oil, whittles into a nub, the whole of it disappearing in their hands, in a constant pursuit of removal. 

They grow up like everyone else, with the earth below their feet, wanting something beyond what made them. Wanting peace. Wanting more. Wanting the night sky to spread an aurora ribbon they can touch. Wanting stoicism of stones unmoved by the course of many lifetimes. That a stone is a piece broken off of something bigger, which came from something even bigger than that, the thought that earth was once a smooth, impenetrable sphere. Not a crack, nor a speck missing. 

Perhaps meaning to say: they get befuddled in the abstractions of growing, holding themselves in the thick darkness of an Alaskan winter, closing their eyes to the feeling of holding themselves, into the absence of body, yet conjuring past bodies that emerge and recede in the mind, and the sensation of wanting to be free of all bodies, even the one that holds them in place, thinking what it might be like to die, though not so much in the sense of wanting to die, but contemplatively stroking the beard a little, picturing what it might be like to grow up and reverse the kitchen knife from the mirepoix, and point it at the sternum, wondering what it might be like to plunge into something so sharp and lethal, what it might be like to miss the person they once were, unsure of who that person is, or ever was. 

Knowing them just by a name. A means to be identified. How they were once a word. A few letters organized to make a sound. And so responds to this sound over time. Moves toward it, or away from it. What their mother yells when it’s past their curfew, and they've forgotten time, all time, just an echo trying to reach their ears across some unknowable distance. 

And so returns to parents who sleep in separate bedrooms, cook in different kitchens, growing to be more separate. They wander childhood streets named Pecan Grove, Rolling Fork Way, Bridge View Terrace, names that come from fairy tales, with beard tufts jutting like tussocks on Colbert's nub, like jagged spires on a limestone mountain, shouting “Here I am!” on ridgelines of pink lichen and green cold rocks, on this sinking ship that is the linear passage of time. Returning to a thin strip of forest between suburban homes, where they were once a boy strapped to their fathers back, following a trail marked by blue paint. They return to their mother yelling “nobs” in a game of cribbage with their father. A meeting place for the two when they can’t keep themselves from the other. Returning to a childhood bed where adventure stories were told, and their spine was tickled, and someone sang a familiar song about collision, as their eyes open and closed in slower intervals. 

They grow up inside of glass walls, in air conditioned waiting areas, on a chair beside other empty chairs, with a sheet of paper that encompasses all they have done and all they have not done, ready to advocate to hiring panels what an asset they could be, a gem really, someone who intends to “leverage their skills” “find solutions to complicated problems” “build relationships’ “help bottom lines” yet finding the interview taking a turn, or not going well, and instead of answering the question, “What is your 5 year plan?” “What is your hope for the future?” “Where will you be down the line?” points to the window behind those who ask such questions and says, “I can, if you want me to, transform into a butterfly and fly out of that fucking window.” 

So returns to dirty mop water in a yellow bucket named after Tom Waits. To a drain in the floor that accepts such filthy liquid. To stabbing burnt pot bottoms with a putty knife. To the trash bags full of old tomato bisque, half eaten onion rings, empty to-go boxes, fragments of egg shells, dirty cabbage peels, empty light bulb packages, and chicken bones extracted of all flavor for that soup-of-the-day’s broth. 

Build-up as a profession, as a layering that manifests some kind of middle. A space to dig up, scrape through, remove, with a putty knife, or mop head, or grill brick, only to return what had been there in the first place. To ice melt that reveals a river, where the most likely to never grow up finds themselves up to the beard in a current realization of a bad idea. Stuck in the middle of a force much greater than their own will to survive, they grow up. By simple inertia, they do, witnessing the idea of their body get taken further and further downstream. And so grows up whispering to a quiet river valley for survival. Though not hearing the words but only the thud of faraway sneakers, pounding against suburban pavement in an attempt to beat the setting sun, to make it home before it’s too late. Chasing the sun, or the sun chasing them, a memory of their mom’s voice in a space inside their brain. Little whispers to rivers that grow backwards into screams. Screaming as a reminder that they are still here, and have been, this whole time. 

And so returns to the calloused palm’s relationship with knife handles. To the blizerp of a ticket machine printing an Everything Omelet for those who enter the world wanting everything. To a truck stop owner carrying frozen beef chubs like their his children. To the deterioration of a grill brick failing to extract the last build up in a flat top corner. A pesky burntness that does not relent no matter how much friction they apply. The brick’s deterioration in this relentless back and forth motion, as sweat off their nose disappears in a sizzle, as the truth about permanence starts to set in.