JESS DU JOUR: WISHING UPON A ... TAR?

Brer Rabbit. The North Carolina Tarheels. Roofing jobs. Street bubbles. Feathers. Five seemingly unrelated terms. But one word, with which I have recently become very familiar, pulls all of these unrelated terms together and squishes them into a big sticky wad. The word?... (blaring trumpets) ... tar.

In the past few months, our family's major undertaking has been the construction of my grandmother's log cabin. Situated on the land near our new house, the construction of the cabin itself seems fairly simple and straightforward -- we were given pre-fabricated, pre-cut, numbered piles of logs and told to notch them together like Lincoln Logs into a small house.

When one is a builder or a carpenter, or even has some cursory knowledge of the house-building business, this is not a difficult task.

What the Berry's Log Home company didn't know, however, was that they were not dealing with builders or carpenters or even people who construct designs out of popsicle sticks. The Berry boys were blindly asking a psychology professor, a chiropractor, an x-ray technician and a 17-year-old amateur journalist to build a small house. "Ha, ha", you scoff, as you drool all over your newspaper with laughter; but, as of two weeks ago, the house was coming along quite nicely. My father, who had spent vast amounts of time reading about log home construction, was organizing our jobs, doing much of the work himself, and moving along more quickly than any of the boys at Berry's expected.

My job, for the most part, was to help drag logs down from their piles, hoist them up onto the foundation of the house, pass out from over-exertion, and then go get more logs. This, outside of the passing out bit, was fine and dandy with me. I thought to myself, "Hey, outside of a few disc bulges, this is a great way to slowly get myself back into shape!" My muscles ached at the end of each day, but it was a contented ache -- content in the fact that, while I was doing treacherous manual labor, I could visualize myself looking shapelier and shapelier in a small black-and-white bikini. My positive attitude about the project, however, was about to change.

"Jess, hand me a screwdriver and help me pry these blue buckets open," my father commanded, motioning for me to approach two frighteningly large buckets-o-tar. I tossed the screwdriver to him and stared agog as he pried open the cans, unleashing the scariest monster I have seen since Poltergeist. My father handed me a paintbrush and handed a roller to my grandmother.

"All the way around the base of the house, up to the blue line," heordered.

The two oozing, dripping buckets of tar bubbled happily at his command, as if they were ready for us to dip into their open mouths so they could devour our hands and arms. I dabbed my brush into the can and smeared the Black Sludge of Death onto the wall. I kept making dramatic oozing noises as I smeared, and Grandma kept warning me to stop because I was scaring my little sisters; but I couldn't help it -- the stuff was really disgusting.

Slowly, we worked our way around the foundation, painting as much tar on ourselves as we were on the wall. The black, gluey colloid that I slopped on the wall seemed to mock my grandmother and I every time we dripped it on ourselves. "Ha ha," the tar would laugh, "I'm going to be stuck to your thighs for weeks!"

By the last corner of our foundation, I had slowly metamorphosized into Jess the human tar-wad. I was spotted, on most of my visible skin, with gunk that felt like melted Tangy Taffy and smelled like a uniform mixture of gasoline and Armor-All.

"Eeeeeeeww. We don't have to ride home with her, do we?" my sister Caitlin whined as we headed towards the car. The rest of my family turned to stare and wrinkled their noses.

I was hurt. I had toiled all day in a muddy, tar-filled trench, and now they stared at me like a leper. I was banished into the back seat and sat on a dirty t-shirt for the trip home. With the aid of some gasoline, I managed to scrub most of the tar off of my skin. Little did I know though, that gasoline mixed with tar is a sneaky little skin-discoloring solution; my arms and legs remained an olive color for the rest of the evening and part of the next day.

A scientist once described tar as being "A dark, oily viscid mixture, consisting mainly of hydrocarbons, produced by the destructive distillation of organic substances such as wood, coal, or peat." I, after my recent encounter with the stuff at my grandmother's cabin, would call it "A hell-spawned, mephitical, sticky mixture manufactured by Lucifer himself and shipped directly to our land in big blue buckets."

Jessica McCuan is a columnist for the Jackson USA Signal.