was my grandmother’s favorite medicine. When we were kids, it was vicks for everything- we used it for the normal stuff but also as a wound dressing, as a drawing salve, as an elixer for coughs, mixed with a little kerosene or corn liquor (yes, we drank shots of Kerosene with Vicks dissolved in them) How we never ended up having our stomachs pumped I’ll never understand.

The little town where I grew up had a lake. I’d never swim in it, but plenty did, and there was always a lot of drinking going on ON the lake, people often drowned.

One particular summer, I was probably ten, had several drownings and it was kind of a maudlin sport among some people to drag for the bodies. Almost everyone I know had a drag, a piece of a board trailing small chains with hooks attached to the end, weighted to hang off the back of the boat. My friend Greg’s dad had a big pontoon boat and we went joyriding as often as we could; they paid for gas by dragging- the town gave them a few dollars an hour to do so.

Dragging was occasionally fun, We’d drag up car parts, (people parked junkers on the lake and had a pool when the ice would melt enough for them to drop)the odd bicycle, fishing equipment, once even an old outboard. Then one fine hot summers day, drinking koolaid out of anodized aluminum cups (remember those?> bright red, bright yellow, bright blue) we pulled a body.

it was the first dead person I had ever seen, and boy, was he dead. Turtles had been working at him, and he was missing most of his face, one hand, and there were a bunch of diamond shape pieces missing from all the places the turtles could reach. This was the first time I had seen the pieces of a skull sticking out through the remains of a face, and made the association wiht the two items. Prior to that they had always been distinct entities- yeah, I know the deal, but you don’t get a visceral feel for the relationship between the two unless you see one peeking out of the other.

What skin was left was horrible, slimy and green with algae where the fat didn’t show white through the turtle bite marks. The smell was horrendous, and Cedar Lake was already pretty bad. Greg’s dad had dragged for the coroner from time to time, he grabbed a little jar of Vicks vaporub from his tacklebox and passed it around. I watched as others on the boat put a dab under each nostril and I followed suit. The menthol masked the smell of the body, and made it possible to work without gagging.

I’ve seen some dead bodies since, lord knows, some long dead like this, some freshly enough dead that they blew their last breaths in my face. You never forget the smell. I still associate Vicks Vaporub’s menthol smell with the smell of death, and my grandmother’s home remedies gave me nightmares ever after, I’d wake up with Vicks rubbed on my chest having dreams of corpses in the moonlight with turtles still munching away.

Happy Sunday! Sorry if i just ruined your breakfast.