by Dean Kuipers
On that occasion, Mom and Dad and Joe had gone to Silver Lake for a few days with Mom’s siblings and their kids, but Brett was seventeen and he stayed home and decided to have a small party. Brett had never caused one lick of trouble and was not one of the popular crowd, but he kinda hoped, in a seventeen-year-old way, that some of the cool kids would turn up to his one and only illicit high school party. He had one or two cases of beer. Dad suspected something was afoot, and he couldn’t stand going to Silver Lake anyway because it was a resort lake and he couldn’t do any real fishing because all his young nieces and nephews wanted to bang away on his aluminum boat with their Fanta bottles and stuff, so they came home a day early. Joe stopped getting drunk in the woods with our cousin just long enough to borrow a bike and ride like hell to a store to call Brett, but when he got there the pay phone was broken.
When Dad came roaring through the door of the house, Mattawan High School’s finest were leaping off the deck and running into the woods to get away from The Terror, and our father waded into the Yngwie Malmsteen or whatever was on the turntable and tore the shirt clean off Brett’s back and slammed him into the wall. He was completely unhinged. “NONE OF YOU WILL EVER SET FOOT IN THIS HOUSE AGAIN!” he bellowed. Mom and Joe stood by the car and waited it out. Dan Paulsen, whose own giant of a father had left him fearing no man, walked calmly past Dad as he thrashed Brett and down the driveway, and Dad hurled after him, “I’m so disappointed, Daniel! I thought we were friends!” To which Dan turned and replied, “We are friends, Bruce. We’re just drinking a beer.” Dan later ended up working for Dad at Delta Design, so I guess that’s some kind of lesson about life.
The worst part was that Dad saw this as an opportunity to apply some of his freshly discovered church discipline, since he’d rejoined the Christian Reformed Church only a few years before. So he dragged Brett around to see the parents of kids who were at the party and to explain that Dishonoring Thy Father and Mother was a breach of God’s covenant. Some of those people took pity on Brett, but some didn’t. One of them yelled at Dad, “What the hell’s going on over there? My daughter came back missing her bra!”
Despite Dad’s mad bid for control, Brett still stayed as close to him as he did to Mom and Joe. He didn’t have much patience for just hanging out, but it was because he wanted time to play his guitar and fish and read sci-fi and be his own person.
While all of us waited for dinner in our hair and discomfort, Brett stood out on the deck, chain-smoking and looking through binoculars at something in the woods. None of us really knew what to do with Dad if we weren’t outdoors; I seriously considered chopping some wood or raking. Brett called me over and handed me the glasses and indicated an old mulch heap. There were seven-foot-tall cannabis plants growing there. “Dad thinks they’re ragweed,” he said.
We wandered around like strangers. We still had rusty pellet guns and moldy shoes in the closets, but we didn’t live there anymore.
When Dad went out to his truck, we checked out the cabinet above the fridge where he kept the liquor: the same dozen dusty bottles of crème de menthe and Martini & Rossi and Kahlúa were in there that I’d moved into the house ten years earlier, but they were all half-empty.
“I used to get in there in the middle of the night and I’d pour a little bit of each one into a two-liter of something and make a nasty Kamikaze and just down it,” said Joe. “I was desperate. That’s why I tried to never stay here once I started drinking. I refilled them with water so that’s mostly just water in those bottles.”
“But why doesn’t he throw this stuff out?” I said.
“To tempt me,” Joe growled. “Just to make me fucking miserable.”
I flipped through Dad’s CDs and put on a new Bonnie Raitt album I liked, Nick of Time. The rest were mostly gospel and Reba. Dad had always been an audiophile and had fitted the house with giant Polk tower speakers, but I couldn’t find his vinyl LPs.
“Dad, where’s all your good records?” I shouted to him.
“Those ones there are all good. Put on the Oak Ridge Boys CD. I like that ‘Elvira.’”
“No, I mean the good ones. You had Isaac Hayes and Lou Rawls, Roberta Flack, all them.”
“Oh, I got rid of those a long time ago. They’re just not what I like to listen to now.”
Bruce’s collection had been mostly Motown, soul, and jazz, plus a few Crystal Gayle or Melissa Manchester albums that he clearly bought because he thought they were sexy babes. He’d had George Benson’s Good King Bad, Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell, Aretha, Earl Klugh, a bunch by Ray Charles—a stack totaling about fifty albums. When I was twelve years old, I spent hours fantasizing about the hot girl on the cover of the R&B organist Earl Grant’s Gently Swingin’.
“He got rid of those records because them were for doin’ the deed,” Brett said matter-of-factly.
“What? No, uh, I just didn’t listen to them anymore, that’s all.”
The house sat at the far western edge of the time zone, so the sun figured to stay up half the night, with a breeze blowing shards of reflected lake light up into the undersides of the trees on the ridge. We ate in the screened porch, my favorite room in the house, which hung about twelve feet high in the trees. The screens puffed in and out with the breathing of the forest. Brett zeroed in on his food and started humming; he hummed when he was eating something he liked. Joe evidently hadn’t had a drink yet and looked bloated and wretched. He and I talked about how nice it was at South Haven, but Dad cut in and started talking about the deer camp. I immediately deflected this toward Brett, mostly as a way to stop that insane humming.
“Brett, you gonna go in November?” I said.
“What? Oh, to the hunting camp? Yeah, I’m gonna go,” he said, diving back into his plate and humming louder, signaling that he didn’t want to talk about it.
“We’re full the first weekend, so Brett’s gonna go the second weekend,” said Dad. “With Jack and Jane, I think.”
“I’m going to find my own little place to sit out there by that bog you talked about, Dad,” said Brett.
“People drive around the edge of that federal swamp sometimes, so you’ll have to stake out a place and make sure no one sits on our spot,” said Bruce.
“I’ll probably just sit on a bucket or something. As long as I’ve got some smokes and a thermos of coffee I can sit out there all day.”
“Ha ha! You know, those deer can smell the smoke,” Dad said, tearing off a series of paper towels to put under each item on the table.
“Nobody better bug me about smoking,” Brett bristled.
“Oooh, shit, I am gonna smoke out there like a chimney,” said Joe.
“Ha ha! Oh God!” choked Dad.
“That’s the whole reason I’m going there: there’s nothing more satisfying than smoking in the woods,” said Joe.
Dad piled on the paper towels. “It can’t be total anarchy,” he said.
“It’s just the opposite,” said Brett. “Cigarettes are how I organize my world.”
Bruce knew they were winding him up, and he was doing his best just to take it and be some facsimile of what he thought “good-natured” was supposed to look like, but his jaw got tight and he was suddenly deadly interested in those paper towels. He fought the unrelenting urge to hold us down and shave our heads and jam the cigarettes and books by the ecophilosopher Arne Naess into the toilet.
“That big buck will know you’re there,” said Dad. “You’ll wreck it for everybody.”
“Oh, the deer don’t give a shit,” Brett retorted. “Remember Jim Card?” That was Bernard’s son who was Dad’s age. “That guy would sit in a La-Z-Boy in his blind and smoke cigarettes and he’d still get a deer about every other year.”
I remembered Jim’s cigarette smoke drifting through the woods, and his bone-rattling snoring.
“He’d be watching football on his little battery-powered TV, too,” added Joe.
“Well, you’ll get a deer but you won’t get the bull of the w
oods, because the big ones get too smart,” said Dad. “And I think we’ve got some big ones around Ike’s place.”
“I’m shooting anything that comes by,” said Brett, trying to keep a straight face.
“If it’s brown it’s down,” said Joe, nodding sagely.
The sun refused to go away. We finished dinner and it was like noon, and Dad grabbed thick packets of photographs and a couple of maps he had staged on the kitchen table, so he could talk about the exact details of how they were going to run the deer camp out of the trailer they had put there, and that was Brett’s signal it was time to go. Doing construction with Dad was fine, but sitting around while our father fretted over camp details like exactly where we could sit and on what, how we would scout the place without scaring the deer, what clothes to bring, who was bringing the powdered milk, and all the rest just ruined it for Brett. Dad was distressed to see him go and leaped into the kitchen and started filling Brett’s arms with food to take with him.
“I know it seems ridiculous, but we can’t just show up there and not have this stuff organized, because we’re staying there with Vern and he’ll want to know exactly what we’re doing,” Dad said, following him out the door. I signaled Dad to stay inside because I never got to see Brett.
Standing at the door of Brett’s truck, I said to him, “I thought going up north to Dad’s deer camp would be about the last thing in the world you’d want to do.”
“No, see, that’s the only thing I want to do with him,” he replied. “It’s being here that sucks. Where we never get to talk about what’s going on in our lives. But being out in the woods is fine.”
“I guess I see it all as the same, now,” I said.
“I want to sit in that swamp. Don’t you?”
He hugged me good-bye.
“You’re so lucky you live in New York.” He got in his little truck, cranked up Ritchie Blackmore’s Rainbow, lit a cigarette, and split.
The closets in my room were stacked with mildewed boxes, and Dad asked me to go through them while I was home to see if there was anything I could get rid of. In one of them I found notes on the ecologist and cyberneticist Gregory Bateson and a quote that I had taped to my wall in college: “You decide that you want to get rid of the byproducts of human life and that Lake Erie will be a good place to put them. You forget that the eco-mental system of Lake Erie is part of your wider eco-mental system—and that if Lake Erie is driven insane, its insanity is incorporated into the larger system of your thought and experience.”
I understood the Lake Erie reference because of the fires on the Cuyahoga and the Buffalo. The lake had been driven insane.
Bateson had given me the first real understanding that my mind wasn’t separate from nature, that in fact most of what I called “my” mind was really a subset of the gargantuan, messy, mind-like entanglement of thinking out there, in the world. The material world and the natural processes going on outside my body were probably generating most of the awareness that I called my “self.” Descartes’s declaration really should have been “I think, therefore we are,” or “It thinks, therefore I am,” or something like that. I read Bateson at an age when I didn’t understand some of it, but the epistemology he laid out in Steps to an Ecology of Mind changed everything:
Now, let us consider for a moment the question of whether a computer thinks. I would state that it does not. What “thinks” and engages in “trial and error” is the man plus the computer plus the environment. And the lines between computer, man, and environment are purely artificial, fictitious lines. They are lines across the pathways along which difference or information is transmitted. They are not boundaries of the thinking system. What thinks is the total system which engages in trial and error, which is man plus environment.
The takeaway, for me, was the phrase What thinks is the total system. By extension, I figured that the total system is different for every being, human or other-than-human. The environment and I were a total system. A single white pine and its environment were a total system. If thinking meant to engage in trial and error, then surely that included pine martens and goldenrod and Lake Erie itself—the lake makes a bid to digest a plastic diaper, fails, tries a fire, partly succeeds; the lake grows a reed marsh to protect its banks from infill, the reed marsh is burned, it tries again; the lake occupies a glacial hole, is sucked back into the ice sheet during the ice age, comes pouring out again when it’s done to fill a differently shaped hole. Trial and error. Thinking.
Our family and Dad’s big house on the hickory hill were a total system. But the forest here had clearly gone mad. It looked gorgeous, yet it was defiled. Mom had nearly died and I’d killed Dad, and Joe was still dragging one hand through the void between life and death trying to get a handhold and yank himself through to the other side, and Brett was doing his limited best to hold all of us together. Why weren’t we able to help one another? Which part of the total system was shattered or polluted or simply gone? Why had we driven one another insane?
Back in New York, I got Joe on the phone and we started talking fishing.
“Oh, I was thinking about this after we went to South Haven,” he said. “There was one time in my life that Dad treated me like an honest-to-God human being, and it explains everything about why I feel good standing in a river.”
Dad had started taking Joe and Brett to the primeval North Branch of the Manistee when they were seven and nine. They had fished in the warm-water lakes around our house and had learned how to catch bass and pike on spin-casting rigs on their own, just the two of them figuring it out together, but they had rarely fished for trout. Dad considered trout the real prize, elusive, cherished, a mystery worth pursuing with mindfulness. It was 1978 when they first waded out in their jeans and Keds into the forty-five-degree-Fahrenheit water of the Manistee for the April trout opener, and there was still snow on the banks. They didn’t have waders, but froze their little balls off because they wanted to prove they could fish with Dad.
Just like when I ran the trap line with Dad, however, it wasn’t long before he disappeared. As soon as the boys started getting snagged in the alders and red osier willows, or broke a hook off, Dad started fuming, and the fuming turned to shouting and cursing—and then he announced, in his waders and his vest dangling with gear, that he was going upstream without them. He told them to fish upstream until they came to a deep hole that had boulders in it “as big as Volkswagen Beetles,” and he would wait for them there. And then he was gone.
Because Brett and Joe were born seventeen months apart, Dad and Mom always treated them as though they were twins and had to do everything together. For most of their lives at home they had the same clothes, the same shoes, the same lunch, the same sporting gear. Everyone assumed they were looking after each other, but that often meant Brett had to care for Joe. The age gap between them was just enough that Brett acquired every skill first, so when Joe had a bad tangle or a fish swallowed his hook, Brett had to help. Joe learned fast, because he didn’t want to burden his brother, but the skills flowed from older to younger, from swimming to riding minibikes to hunting. Still, they both agreed they better not bother Dad. They had to prove they were self-reliant as fishermen.
They didn’t get in the way or get hypothermia or get lost, so they won themselves some more trips to the river. Eventually, Dad bought them some green rubber waders, but Joe didn’t wear them half the time because if you fell down they could fill with water and stuff you under a log and drown you and even Brett might not be able to save him.
“Dad took us fishing, but we basically taught each other how to fish,” Joe said.
On the particular year of Joe’s story, he was thirteen, and it was just him and Dad on the river. Joe already had some renown as a fisherman. By that time, there were famous stories of him catching a monster crappie in Silver Lake, a miracle steelhead off the pier at Pentwater, trout after trout on a family trip out West. When he caught up with Dad at the hallowed pool with boulders as big as Volkswa
gens, the deep water was almost black in the failing light. I knew from fishing on the Manistee how it would look: the midsummer boreal sunset turned the sandy needle duff pink and ignited the jack pines and cedars and set them flaring against the sky as he made a few last, careful casts.
Brett had landed a decent fish there two years earlier, and Dad had unleashed such a shit-storm of anxiety on him, hurling instructions down the bank, that Brett had informed Dad on the spot that he’d never fish with him again, and he hadn’t. It was the end of their father-and-son fishing for years. Joe’s experience went the other way. He made a last cast and something huge, something soft and big-shouldered, sucked in his crawler, and then the steady pressure and the drag on his reel began to sing. In the riffles above the hole they clearly saw the big fish scattering gravel as it dug northward.
“My God, son! That’s the biggest river fish I’ve ever seen!” Dad shouted from the bank. “It’s a tuna!”
“Let him have line! Oooohhhh, son! You’ll probably never land that fish, we just don’t know how to catch fish like that, but it sure is great to see him!”
By then, we’d all spent so much time hunting and fishing with Dad that his responses were as predictable as a diner jukebox: you dropped in a slug of hope or surprise and strange abuse dressed up as self-loathing came warbling out. He vomited his mad instructions down the bank about setting the drag and how to reel, but Joe stopped listening. All he heard was fish. Joe knew in that moment that he adored fishing. “I realized I loved this fish,” he said. “I didn’t feel lost or inadequate or split; I just felt at home.” He and this fish were the same: more than anything else, they wanted to live, and they needed the river to do it.
The fish took pretty much the whole spool, maybe one hundred yards of line strung along the river, stretched from rock to tag alder to cedar through islands of blackberry and lady slipper orchid and along all manner of deadfall strainers laced across the creek. Line was strung all through the woods. There was little chance of untangling a fish from that web, but Joe stood there above the hole and patiently started reeling and then reeling in earnest, and after a while the line came in freely.