The Walking Year

Back to School

~ John ~ Leave a comment

I live in the same town where I went to college.  Whenever I want to revisit my youth – and simultaneously feel its loss – all I have to do is stroll through campus on my way to work.  Of course, my walks through campus aren’t entirely recreational these days.  But mostly I take the bus, reserving the full stroll across the quad for mornings when I’m not in a hurry and need either the exercise or the meditation.

Last Friday I needed both.  My neurologist had recommended I switch to a new anti-convulsant, since neither my symptoms nor the current drug’s side effects are “where we’d like them to be,” and also confirmed that my driving privileges aren’t being restored anytime soon (I’m becoming a dreadful backseat driver – I worry that my family may install a passenger-side ejector seat, a la James Bond’s car in Goldfinger, if I don’t learn to shut my yap).  It was a deep overcast morning, with a chill that augured the onset of fall.  I headed out of my neighborhood, which after a few blocks gives way to ramshackle student rentals, rich-kid condos and stately sororities.  A couple emerged from a scarred doorway of one house, a boy and a girl implausibly young for college.  He started his Vespa in the bare front yard and motioned her to get on.  Shyly she climbed astride, and they purred off into the drizzle, the feelings on their faces as fragile as their unhelmeted skulls.

The rain thickened as I traversed the quad towards the bronze statue of Robert Frost, life-size, in a seated pose with suspenders, open collar, and a poised writing easel, looking into the middle distance on the verge of a Great Thought.  Close by was a boy who peered out at the morning student rush in undisguised misery, sitting as near as possible to the Frost effigy without touching it, like a baby Rhesus Monkey in an experimental psych lab trying to derive comfort from a cloth mother that delivers nothing but random electric shocks.  “College was supposed to be where it gets BETTER!” he seemed silently to scream.  I motored past, thinking, “Don’t worry, it does get better.  Just not right away.”  Beyond lay the path to Varsity Pond, where box turtles and sophomores sun themselves in good weather, now full of oncoming faces that were mostly worried or opaque, lost in worlds of tests yet untaken, friends yet unfound, lives yet unlived.  A college campus on a rainy morning, three weeks into the year.

Past the pond, the city resumed, and the adults seemed no happier.  A twentysomething in a Toyota Tantrum LX honked at the indignity of having to stop behind a public bus.  Other drivers gunned ahead, getting crossly on with their day.  Instead of the comfort of Frost, I found myself sliding into the blues of William Blake:

I walk down every chartered street
Where the chartered Thames does flow
And mark in every face I meet
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.

But as I approached my office on Pearl, there appeared the antidote it all: an East Indian man in a wheelchair, swaddled in a sodden blanket, legs wrapped in surgical tape, propelling himself up the rainy sidewalk with swollen, bare feet.  He looked at me with the most beatific smile, wishing me good morning.  I offered him no help for his journey other than to greet him back with all the joy I could muster.  A moment later, I heard a voice call my name.  I turned to see our friend and gifted music teacher Carolyn Meyer, blowing me a kiss from her unrolled window.  I finished my commute, damp from rain, and stunned by radiance upon radiance.

Roots

~ John ~ Leave a comment

My wife Beret is up and walking after back surgery last Thursday.  Our wedding vows in 1987 featured an allusion to Rilke, about a married couple growing like trees, parallel but apart, so “that two solitudes protect and border and salute each other.”   But 27 years on, I find us growing more like the mesquite and prickly pear in my cousin Morris’ beautiful painting below.  Not that our entanglements are quite so visible above ground.   This summer’s bilateral health challenges have prompted each of us to grant the other new space, giving the person whose body it is the choice of how much pain to push through, or how much vertigo to court.   Our intertwining runs deeper, in the roots, where a shock to one flows straight into the sap of the other.  Beret’s lumbar disc blew out one day after my major seizure in June.  And my biggest seizure since then rolled like a thundershower into her hospital room the same afternoon her disc shrapnel was removed (I know – it’s all about ME!).

What I like best about Morris’ painting is that, at a certain point, there is no individual “self” at all – just a tangle of cactus pears and limbs of mesquite anchored to a rock (no doubt sheltering a nest of armadillos or rattlesnakes underneath).  And so, really, no “death” at all, unless somebody comes along with a dozer to gouge the whole thing out; and even then, our roots will save us.

Our Enemy the Beaver

~ John ~ Leave a comment

We’ve just ended a sorely-needed week of vacation near Yellowstone.  Dad bought into this fishing ranch in the 1960s, and I’ve spent a week here nearly every summer since I was eight.  The ranch gave me my first job stringing fence and herding cattle, more horse-fly bites than I can count, and a lifelong conversation with my father.

He and I have argued about politics and parenting, sighted wildlife, gotten nostalgically drunk, and listened silently to the riffles running past the porch of the log house he built for his retirement.   Fortunately, we’ve become better listeners to each other since he died 14 years ago.  I recently came across a hardback edition of “The Jungle Book” that Dad inscribed to me on my eighth birthday.  He had apparently hoped I would absorb Rudyard Kipling’s animal fables of obedience to one’s parents and superior officers, and so take my place in the social order that once supported the might of empire.  Unfortunately, he gave me the book in 1968, a time when everyone under 30 (myself included) judged Kipling to be full of fascist crap, so I never read it.

But Dad was laughing at me the other night.

The best trout fishing on this property happens between dinner and dark.  You can choose the river, which involves work, skill, and stealth, or you can fish the pond, which merely requires that you heave your fly a decent distance from shore.  I was too rebellious as a teen to permit Dad to teach me to fish the river properly.  But he did drill into me the ability to cast a fly, and I love floating a long line over still water with the sunset deepening into moonlight, and listening for trout to rise.  It’s in the cast, and the anticipation, that the pleasure lies.  Actually catching anything almost ruins it.

A family of beavers also inhabit the pond these days.  In Dad’s era, beaver were not allowed to keep lodges on the pond, nor on the prime fishing stretches of the river, owing to their tendency to disagree with humans over the proper course of water.  Dad and his partners employed a retired game warden named Pinky Sears to oversee the ranch, and his wildlife management plan for beaver featured a .38 service revolver.  He sometimes let me fire it at brown bottles while he made remarks about “expelling flatus.”  In those days, I got along with Pinky a lot better than with Dad.

Of course, with both of them now gone, my generation is making the decisions, and we mostly voted for Obama.  Consequently, when I walked out to my favorite fishing point at dusk two nights ago, a beaver swam straight towards me from his lodge on the far bank.  He stationed himself about 30 feet to my right, lay on his back, paddled in circles, and periodically slapped his tail in the water (which, if you’ve never heard it, sounds like a cannonball into a swimming pool).  I thought, “OK, fine.  You can have that spot.  I’ll fish the other side of the point.”  But just as I turned and began to cast, a second beaver cruised up and started putting on the exact same show to my left, about the same distance away.  I couldn’t decide whether they were channeling Kipling or Gandhi, but the result was the same.  As darkness fell and I stood there processing the fact that I was being hazed off the pond I’ve fished for 45 years by a pair of goddamned beavers, I heard my father’s favorite phrase: “John, the REALITY is, somebody’s got to be in charge.”  I still chafe against the idea that there’s “a” reality, but with two live beavers and my dead father ganging up on me at once, there’s only so much denial I can sustain.