That first summer Juliet and I are in heaven—Sky Pond is a pond of friends, suddenly. We still visit the Kimbers’ to swim, sometimes in their company, as often not. Our welcome at the McNairs’ new camp seems equally large, but still, we don’t want to wear it out, or wear the McNairs out, especially in these first months of their ownership.
Juliet’s got news, too: she’s pregnant with our first child. In July it’s seven months, August eight, and we lumber down the hill to the camps. In the water Juliet is still a porpoise—swimming is her favorite pregnant exercise—she’s buoyant and round, full of this girl who will be born in September. Backstroke and the belly is prominent, looms out of the water, shines in the sun, you can’t believe how gorgeous. But still Juliet swims faster than I can, and stays in longer. No danger of her sinking. She wears her same old two-piece throughout the pregnancy, slings the bottom piece low under her enormous belly, something she’s learned watching me dress all these beer-belly years (I’m shaped like a basketball fan, but the swimming should help).
The swimming, the swimming. The swimming is the same as ever in some ways—except that now you look over at the flag camp and see the people there and feel somewhat under their gaze then realize that the people there are ... Wes and Di! It’s only a matter of five or six swims before we decide to swim over to their dock to say hi, pull ourselves up to barking dogs (Annie, Charlie), let leap our own barking dogs from the water. Wes comes down bearing camera and gets great shots—of Juliet and me side by side with Elysia inside Juliet, our two glistening bellies in sunshine, the sunshine of their dock, our first Sky Pond sunbathing, in sight of Kimbers’ shady dock. And Di comes down in bathing suit and Wes strips down to his from his great height and you realize these dear friends have legs you’ve never seen in the decade you’ve known them and entire bodies. And even on the threshold of sixty human years these bodies are beautiful, and Diane gets a noodle and wraps it around her ample self and floats off, learning to swim, buoyant as hell (“My boobs are so big they float,” she calls merrily). And Wes swims out into the pond saying how cold but stays in long, gets his exercise.
Then we cowbirds swim away, I first, slower and impatient, Juliet next, fast and full, Wally a gargantuan leap from the dock and passes me instantly and snaps bugs and gone off on his many missions: loons, water skeeters, drifting scents. Desi, though, Desi would just as soon not leap in but can’t figure the best way to get closer to the water so he can be dainty about the thing. He barks and cries piteously, leaps from dock to canoe to dock and back again, not heeding Wes’s advice (“Over here, over here, Desmond!”), not heeding Diane’s (“Desi, you big dumb mammal, down here!”), but pacing and whining and finally not jumping at all but having a brainstorm, spin and run back off the dock, spin and run, race us barking back through the forest, no slow swimming for him, no contest. He has to wait a long while but meets us gaily at Kimbers’ dock when we arrive. There we dress.
We come to the McNairs’ by land, too, come and do jigsaw puzzles; we eat, we drink, we talk—it’s a place to talk (Wes has said). We see the McNairs’ visitors, get their talk, too. Sometimes the visitors are the Kimbers, and then it’s a Sky Pond quorum. So good to have all these friends so close and on water.
And we swim—from Kimbers’ to McNairs’. At McNairs’, we pull up on the dock and Wes and Di come down and we drip and chat and grow chilly; we dive in then and swim away, four heads. We’re pond people, very nearly. We come with my dad when he visits and we come with Juliet’s folks when they do and one fall day we even sneak onto the porch when no one is home so Juliet can sit in a rocking chair to breastfeed Elysia Pearl, newly arrived. We come for dinner, and we come to see the new stove (Kimber has helped install it), and we come to see the weasel Annie has killed; we come just to be there. The evenings are best, as fall comes in and swimming is over for the year. One looks out over the pond and sees only sky (as Wes has pointed out), one sighs with the thought of winter.
One afternoon I pop over and it’s just Wes and me and we talk and eat peanuts and drink small sips of whiskey and then beers. In the failing light Wes points out a particular camp down the way, the modest camp across from where Bob and I once built a dock together, the plain-hewn camp with rocks I often notice, with trees where the heron roosts, the camp with the homemade dock on rollers: “I haven’t seen many people there this summer—not once this summer have I seen those people. It’s an old guy. And his daughters are grown and gone off and have better things to do. You know that kind of thing. Kimber thinks they’ll be wanting to sell soon.”
I think of Elysia jumping from the old handmade dock into the sky down there. Think of all our heads bobbing through the water over to Kimbers’, thence to McNairs’, thence home again. Fire in the hearth, pot of soup in the fire, feet on the stool, book in the lap. Juliet making watercolors. No phone, no power, outhouse mildly fragrant. Elysia playing jacks with a friend out on the moss, five or nine or twelve years old. Kissing her boyfriend out on the moss. Just a vision, that’s all. Not a premonition. Certainly doesn’t mean I’m going to be able to buy any camp, not even that nice old one over there on Lucy Point (named by Bob after their late lovely pup). Not even that nice one over there under tallest white pines with dock not even rolled out this summer, not even once.
My Life as a Move
It’s about geography, I keep telling myself. One has one’s internal landscape painted by age forty or so. One’s external landscape had better match. In Ohio, I kept looking for the sea, looking for ponds and lakes, looking for a recognizable kind of river, one that tumbles through rocks. I kept looking for a mountain, and mountains. The dirt, I thought, shouldn’t be so white. The views should be longer. The clouds ought to be this way, the air should smell thus. And even after six partial years (Juliet and I never gave up Maine summers, and only three Maine autumns), even after all that time, I walked around feeling strange (as in stranger), an oddity, an outlander. It’s geography and not just me, is what I say.
But it’s easy to blame a place for every misery, and I think I did this in Ohio, sometimes getting mean about it, for example, making up state mottoes: Ohio: Perfectly Acceptable! But I liked a lot about Ohio (of which large place I know only Columbus very well). I liked the thunderstorms in spring, some lasting all day, all night, all of another day. I liked the possibility of tornadoes. I liked the caves in the Hocking Hills, and I liked the forests preserved there, the huge trees (especially the hemlocks), the tight hills and hollows, the scruffy farms. I liked the cornfields, the Amish buggies, the million hawks, the scarlet tanager, the flocks of ducks, the convocations of great blue herons. I liked very much being at the far west side of the Eastern time zone, sunset nearly two hours later all year than in Maine, mornings dark. In the city I liked the museums. I liked the conservatory and its tropical rooms, its desert rooms, the bonsai trees. I liked the wonderful gardens everywhere around town, I liked the baseball games at all levels. I liked certain restaurants abjectly. I liked the trains, long freight and coal trains that rumbled in the night, romantic whistles, even a derailing crash or two in my short time there at the nexus of so many lines. I liked the Ohio State University campus, especially the oval and pond, designed by Frederick Law Olmstead when he was only twenty-three. I liked things about the abstract university, too, and things about my job there. And of course I liked many people, and miss them already, though some seemed so very odd to me, built of confidently Ohio pieces I didn’t understand and couldn’t quite guess at. The others came from other places, so at least were as tentative as I. When an easterner turned up in any of my classes, I knew it right away from something about the quality of the air around her, something ineffable but real.
Elysia was born in Maine in an autumn I was off duty from teaching and so released from Ohio. Holding her from the first minutes I knew what it felt like to be home, really home, and to leave seemed unthinkable. I wanted unequivocally to raise her in Maine. Because somehow that has become my landscape; that,
somehow, is where I’m from, is where I am even when I’m not. I did not want to look at my daughter on, say, her tenth birthday, and think (as did a transplanted friend of his own daughter): Oh my God, she’s from Ohio.
In the nights after my wife and our dogs and I moved into our nice-enough rented house in the German Village section of Columbus, Juliet couldn’t figure out where to sleep. Moving in we had picked the smaller of the two bedrooms because it would be further from the quaint brick street and the all-night rattling of old cars and empty trucks and the intermittent rumbling of tires. But our neighbors to the north (a sweet and yet irascible couple whom we already miss) had a bright and necessary security light that shone in the windows of that back room like a flying-saucer transport ray that I could only wish would beam us up and elsewhere. And only a block away was High Street, the main drag of a whole city: sirens and laughter and fast-food order-up speakers turned up too loud in winter.
Welcome to Long John Silver’s!
The problem wasn’t urban-ness; we’d lived in plenty of cities, including New York, where Juliet grew up. The problem, perhaps, was this particular brand of urban-ness, these houses that filled old pastures for mile upon mile reached on roads that looked all the very same with the same mall repeated and repetitious fast-food signage and a thousand identical stoplights at near-identical intersections timed slower than I was used to: one sat at the lights all day as various arrows came green, went orange, went red. The green light only released one to more of the same.
I’d wake in the middle of the night to Juliet clambering out of bed and tromping into the front room to lie on the guest futon in her nightie. Then I’d wake to her emphatic return. Then wake to her tossing again, then rising again, this time angrily taking all the covers with her to the front room, accusingly leaving me there naked and horripilant on a bare sheet.
This went on at least a week. I’d say, “Sweetie?”
May I take your order?
And since I was awake anyway, she’d let me have it: Why did we have to move so much! She hated Columbus! She hated this house! She hated her new studio! She never wanted to move again! How did she get stuck in a life of following a husband around?! What about New York! What about Maine! What about her career? What about that?
What could I say? She was right. My job had brought us here, nothing else, unless it was ambition, my own. And my idea that Ohio wasn’t permanent, repeated soothingly, was no comfort at all, none.
About that time I heard a Tibetan Buddhist monk on public radio tell his famous host that indeed he was jetlagged after his trip, just waiting for his soul to catch up. That’s all he said about that, kind of under his breath. But souls, I gathered, can go only at soul speed, faster than walking but slower than flying in a jet. Maybe about as fast as driving in a car around town, about thirty miles an hour, or forty. So of course you’re going to feel weird after a fast trip of any kind. You drive four hours at sixty-five miles an hour and don’t feel right till your soul gets there, about halfway through dinner.
And souls must travel at different rates. Certain politicians and businessmen seem to have very fast souls. Dog souls travel like dog shadows: full speed and not detachable. The evidence shows that my own soul is not only detachable, but is a dismally slow traveler. Juliet’s, 1 think, slower yet.
And yet we’ve moved relatively a lot. From a one-bedroom on West 93rd Street in New York when we were married (June 1990) to Cerqueux-sous-Passavant, Maine-et-Loire, France (I count this as a move even though it was our honeymoon—those six weeks in the same converted farm building, the two of us working the whole time—because it was the beginning of the tearing from New York City and her family of my wife, and from youth of myself: brutal separation, intense transition, how else define a move?). Thence to my sister Carol’s place in Helena, Montana (this in September, still 1990, in our used minivan weighed down to the wheel wells with far too many and mostly pathetic belongings, a huge pile of extra stuff wrapped in one of those blue tarps and tied to the roof—we took out a motel canopy in, oh my God, Ohio, had to stay a miserable extra day), just a few weeks on Carol’s office floor on a guest mattress till Juliet and I found our own rather crummy place to rent on Rodney Street. We weren’t perfectly happy there, but we had my sister’s friends to hang with, a book contract in hand, a hospital job for Juliet, part-time. Midwinter I flew off to Maine to interview at the University of Maine at Farmington, got the job somehow.
So in August 1991, we were moving once again. We rented a U-Haul, loaded it full and loaded our new used vehicle (Juliet had had a terrible car wreck during our Christmas visit to Seattle, long story), loaded to the ceiling with even more belongings (and a new canoe on top), and drove five days east with Desmond, a puppy then, our souls plodding way, way after. I still miss the Rocky Mountains, the Missouri River, and a place called the Broadwater, a hot springs with two huge swimming pools you could paddle in at midnight, forty below in February, and watch the stars turn through pool mist.
We seem to grant to our high-speed roads and our airlines the rather thoughtless assumption that people can change places as rapidly as their bodies can be transported.
—Wendell Berry
Juliet’s body, mind you, was being transported to a town she’d never seen. She fell into appropriate tears at our prospects daily in those first months: she was friendless, ungrounded, unmoored. She’d just been getting settled in Montana, and even though we’d never thought our tenure there would be permanent (unto death, I guess that means), leaving was all but traumatic. I was in the same straits, but I had a job, and those hundred instant contacts made all the difference. No amount of Maine beauty and no amount of saying I would have been glad to follow her somewhere and no amount of knowing that we were running out of money in Montana assuaged her, understandably.
The university is delicate about all this, with much discussion of spousal advocacy and spousal hiring (much discussion, little action). But corporate America and sociologists (like Anne B. Hendershott, in her book Moving for Work) call women who thusly follow their husbands “trailing wives,” as if this were a neutral term. Trailing wives!
Therapists write little books of self-help for the move, talk about moving as if it were death followed by grieving, in Kübler-Ross stages: denial (refusal to pack), anger (you patriarchal motherfucker, why do we have to move!), depression (I hate this place, I’m tired, I don’t want to see anyone), bargaining (next time we move for me!). The final stage is acceptance. Poor, trailing Juliet got through the first four stages pretty quickly in Ohio. The fifth, acceptance, she never found, in fact, had her own name for it: “Stepford Wives.” Oh, honey, really, it’s so lovely here. I just want to thank you and your job for everything.
Me, I never got past anger, maybe stuck there since I was six years old. But more about that shortly.
Our first house in Maine was a rental, and it’s possible our souls never lived in that good house at all, so slow was their trek eastward from Montana. After a year in Maine, though, we bought this place (our first!), ten miles further upstream along the lovely Sandy River from our original landing place and moved yet again, making many trips with the help of many new acquaintances in many old pickup trucks, the two of us now thoroughly saddled with belongings. We worked on our house for four years, really enjoying the nesting, the owning, the improving, the sense of continuity, of place. Juliet started and built an independent art therapy practice, making use of her Pratt Institute degree (Master of Psychological Studies) and unbelievable entrepreneurial pluck. I taught. For the health of her soul, Juliet painted, grew into her talent. For the health of my soul, I puttered in the garden, grew into the dirt.
We hiked in the woods. We swam in the rivers and ponds and lakes. We skied and skated and shoveled snow. Juliet said she had never been so happy. We were in love with our house, smitten. We were in love with our town. We got a new dog, a pal for jealous Desmond. We had enough money for the first time ever. Life was good.
&nb
sp; If it were all about geography, we’d have simply stayed put.
But after only four years (it seems longer than that now), after only four years, the length of, say, a college career, our settled bliss began to ripple, then quake, finally blew up. My job, with its heavy load (teaching the least and best of it—I’m not a bad teacher, dedicated to the point of exhaustion, grumpy but well-meaning, focused on my students’ independence so fiercely that they often think I’m abandoning them, which I am, in a benign kind of way), the job had got in the way of my writing and reading, and in truth of teaching itself. All along, I had to admit, I’d had my academic sights set higher. And my real sights were set on ... getting out. Hard to admit (or even know, when the immediate pressing goal was tenure), but for me the university was only a contingency till writing might pay the way. And in the meantime, I needed a job that gave me time to write. Time to write my way out of academia altogether.
In the meantime, too, imperatives of career pulled at the geographical imperative. Temptation came along in the form of a writer acquaintance who insistently recruited me for Ohio State (of all places), came during a particularly sharp but now forgettable battle with administrators over my promised early promotion. I won and was promoted because I was willing to leave, and I was willing to leave because the battle had come about at all. With a job change and move I could free myself from pettiness, punish my tormentors, so I thought. Still, I wouldn’t have considered the offer from Ohio State if Juliet had not decided at just that time to go for an M.F.A. in painting. This M.F.A. could not be postponed any longer. She sent out applications to all the best schools. The times, they were a-changing.
Into Woods Page 18