On burdens and bodies of water
am I constrained or am I beholden?
When is anything too much? When is it not enough? I keep noticing these nagging questions as they sail by me, carried on the cooling winds from Canada that shudder the surface of the lake.
“Do you know that I’ve counted the word obliged three times so far?” I say.
I’m sitting in a low beach chair with my spouse Janyce beside me in a chair of her own. We’re both reading paperbacks by the edge of a blue lake surrounded by towering pine trees.
“Did you know that an Octopus only lives for about three years?” says Janyce, looking over at me, her eyes just clearing the top of her own book.
It’s mid-afternoon on a Wednesday in August and we’re on vacation. I burrow my bare toes in the rocky sand and close my book on my lap for a moment, taking in the full expanse of the lake only a few feet away. Tiny waves slap along the shoreline, rolling up to a foamy edge. The wind picks up and ripples over the water, buffeting the sturdy white flowers that poke out of the sand at my feet. I watch them bend on their spindly three-pronged stems until they’re almost flat to the ground and then they spring upright again. I can’t decide if I’m hot or if I’m cold as the sun keeps disappearing and reappearing from behind clouds.
The Airbnb sent us paperwork to sign before we arrived. Basically, we were to park our car near the tiny house cabin we were renting for a few nights and remain on the property, quarantined according to the strict Vermont rules for Covid. I didn’t mind. It just meant we would need to stay put and do nothing and that was fine by me. No cellphones, no wifi, no radio or screens. It would be the first time I opened a book to read for real since March.
The property we’re on is an old campground recently acquired by an ambitious couple of childhood friends. They’re entrepreneur types who decided to purchase the entire dilapidated operation on a whim— a shining oval lake surrounded by weathered buildings of all shapes and sizes that once housed the arts and crafts, the dining hall, the boat house, and the sleeping bunks of a summer camp for girls. Each building has matching green metal roofs and the new owners seem keen on preserving the spirit of a campground, only now with upgraded luxuries such as oscillating fans hung from the ceiling and strategically placed high-end gas grills on rock formations they’ve concocted themselves.
“Four. She just used the word again,” I say.
If I had wifi on my phone I’d be looking up the word “obliged” but I know at least one of its meanings is: to do as someone asks or desires in order to please them.
I’m reading M Train by Patti Smith and I’m captivated by her beautiful phrases and her spartan meals. “For breakfast most days she eats only brown bread and olive oil with a cup of black coffee,” I say. “Another day she might have a bowl of bean soup.” A few pages later, I read out loud descriptions of her simple meal of buckwheat noodles and yams, or the piece of hermetically sealed cornbread she buys from the deli to eat outside on her city stoop on a winter day.
On the eve of our vacation, I got out of bed at midnight to rummage through the bags already tightly packed in the back seat of the car in the driveway. How many kinds of bread do you really need for a four-day stay? I gathered up an assortment of packages and took out half of everything and carried it back into the house. In the grocery store, I felt we needed hearty english muffins smeared with preserved salty rosemary goat cheese and piled high with buttered mushrooms. And we had to have small squares of flaky croissant bread to toast until golden, slathered with butter and raspberry jam, and then a whole loaf of bakery rye bread made its way into the cart, to be a later conduit for stone ground honey mustard and rolls of ham. I left the plastic container filled with cinnamon sugar dusted donut holes untouched, and I passed over the container of artisan crackers made from the spent grains that were once used to make beer.
Janyce gently questioned my large assortment of food delights when we were shopping. “It’s so we have options,” I said. And she left it at that. But I know that the food is a talisman and the need for it as old as I am. Fifty four years of filling up an emptiness I still can’t quite place.
Smith is writing about the artistic process as a burden, and I’m impressed with all the clever tricks she employs to get herself to write the very book I’m holding in my hands. How she manages to conjure up the character of the cowpoke to ask him questions, how she employs the pieces of dreams she wakes up remembering, and resurrects the memories of her odd days with her late husband. She propels the narrative forward on interior tracks through the service of colorful stories that serve as portals to the outside. The writer as conductor.
Right before we headed out for Vermont we took our favorite three-mile hike, the one that begins by crossing a footbridge over a woodland pond complete with a beaver dam at one end and slowly becoming overrun with lily pads. We’ve been walking the same path for years in all weather, stopping on the bridge to take a selfie overlooking a frozen expanse, or standing still at the railing at dusk silently watching a beaver make its way across the center of the pond, one long trail down the middle, and listening for the echo off the trees as it slaps its wide tail against the surface. Lately though, the pond has been looking a little worse for wear. Now teeming with bullfrogs in all stages of life and surrounded by ragged scraggy trunks standing barren along the banks like sentinels. When is it all too much for the pond? All these frogs, and all these beavers chipping deep wedges into the base of the trees only to be abandoned, the job left half-done, half-realized?
When is anything too much? When is it not enough? I keep noticing these nagging questions as they sail by me carried on the cool winds from Canada that shudder the surface of the lake. Patti Smith thinks it’s okay to waste an entire day watching crime shows, or to wait around all day in the service of someone else’s desires in order simply to please them, or to sit behind an old building and wonder about life and think about nothing in particular and everything at once. I think it all ends up working so well for her artistically because she is okay with herself. Long ago she has taken in an elemental truth that I have not—that not all dreams need to be realized. That a beautiful lake is just a body of water, and a vacation day is just another day in a string of many moments still to come, one after another, piling up and disappearing against the shore.