Spitting Lessons

Mar 23, 2018
4 min read

by Karen J. Weyant

The Clarion River always seemed to struggle for breath.

Its sluggish waters moved at a slow crawl, lazy ripples slurping the muddy shores. Even after a hard rain or a spring melt, the brown water seemed stagnant, thickening into dark pools before laboriously flowing south.

The kids in our small community spent our summer evenings standing on the bridge watching the river that divided our northern Pennsylvanian town in two. Sometimes, we looked for fish, but most of the time we tried to identify the garbage in the water — bright blue Pepsi cans, cigarette butts, the flash of gold on Camel cigarette packages, plastic straws, even bigger objects, like shopping carts or old bicycles.

Upchuck, throw up, blow chunks, barf, hurl — these were all words a third grader was taught on school playgrounds, at the bus stop, and on the local Little League fields. Often, they were taught to me by the boys at school, all who seemed to have a secret knowledge of disgusting words and a great skill at identifying mysterious objects half hidden in the Clarion. Their language seemed to contain appropriate words for our river, and I often played with their words, the sounds mysteriously repulsive as the vowels and consonants rolled in my mouth.

And looking back, I realized that the word “spit,” with its soft, soothing s sound followed by a hard p that made my lips form a slight pout, was also an ideal word to add to my ever-growing vocabulary list I would associate with the river.

During this time in my life, I was fascinated with spitting, both the sound of the word and the act itself.

I was the youngest girl in a neighborhood filled with boys. I was also the youngest of eight with four older brothers. I was surrounded by a world of men, and at a young age, I was indoctrinated into their blue-collar landscape of grease, dirt, beard scruff, and tobacco cans branded on the back pockets of worn jeans. I watched the younger boys in my neighborhood as they imitated their fathers, fetching bottles of beers during adult Friday night poker games and handing wrenches and screwdrivers to their older brothers parked under hoisted trucks in tool-cluttered garages.

Still, while I found many of these activities intriguing, I was especially interested in learning how they spit.

Danny, a boy who was younger than me by two years, was an expert. But, he was more than just an expert — he was willing to teach me. He showed me how to breathe sharply through my nose and gurgle in the back of my throat, until I had an impressive wad of phlegm I could spit.

I practiced until my spit arched high into the air before splashing down into the Clarion’s stale water that even the sturdiest waterbugs seemed to avoid.

At home in my own backyard, I demonstrated my newfound talent to my mother, who winced and later complained to my father about my actions.

“The Clarion?” asked my father, a man who was more worried about slashes in company benefits and the ever-growing threats of permanent layoffs. This was the same man who would not fish in its waters and forbade us from swimming, or even wading, in its waves.

“Won’t hurt, might help,” he shrugged.

Still, on those summer evenings, when I stood practicing spitting on the bridge, I wasn’t thinking of hurting.

Or helping.

I knew the Clarion River eventually joined the Allegheny River which flowed south to Pittsburgh to form the Ohio, which then flowed to the Mississippi River. Then, of course, the waters of the Mississippi poured into the Gulf of Mexico. I traced the Clarion River’s path in my mother’s well-loved Rand McNally atlas, my finger outlining the river’s journey through the worn hills of the northern Alleghenies.

Anything that managed to get caught in the Clarion River’s current had a chance of making it out of this town. Yes, paper napkins may disintegrate along the way and Styrofoam cups may get snagged on rocks or tree branches, but there was always that chance. Spit, of course, with its fluidity, had the best possibility of surviving the waters, I thought, clearly ignoring the fact that the globs we all hawked would soon dissolve in the ripples.

So, I stood on the bridge and I spit. And I spit again.

I wondered what part of me would make it out of my hometown.

Karen J. Weyant’s poetry and prose have been published in Briar Cliff Review, Cold Mountain Review, Copper Nickel, Punctuate, Spillway, Storm Cellar, River Styx, Waccamaw, and Whiskey Island. She is the author of two poetry chapbooks, Stealing Dust (Finishing Line Press, 2009) and Wearing Heels in the Rust Belt (Winner of Main Street Rag’s 2011 Chapbook Contest). She teaches at Jamestown Community College in Jamestown, New York. When she is not teaching, she explores the rural Rust Belt of northern Pennsylvania and western New York.