No commencement. No thoughts. Just write.
I remember when I was little, I used to daydream about my family being some long-lost branch of the royal family and that one day, we would be found again in some glorious, magical moment where we’d be whisked away overseas and settle into a new life, living in castles and wearing gowns and having sparkly jewelry. That daydream, while not as pervasive as back then, is still with with me. I still daydream about those romantic little things. Always a dreamer.
I get so lost in my imagination. Completely absorbed into the worlds I see on the screen or read in books. Sometimes daydreaming was a way to organise my thoughts and gave me something to focus on. It’s how I calm down enough to fall asleep. I think of something, someone, a moment, a day and just let my imagination run free, follow it through its life from beginning but never to the end because I’m usually asleep by then. Sometimes my dreams will carry on my daydreams. It’s led to some strange ones. Always vivid, sensual, beautiful and frightening. My dreams are the reason I don’t do drugs because if my imagination is capable of producing those environments without any help, I’m a little frightened by what I might see were I to willingly induce an alternative state of mind aside from daydreams (and occasionally alcohol).
The summer of 2004.
That year, the Department of Natural Resources was cut from state funding and became completely reliant upon motor vehicle and camping permit sales to support the park system. The majority of tourists, whether they like to hear it or not, are curmudgeonly and scrooge-like when it comes to having to spend a little extra. I admit that sometimes I feel the same way (but I never travel without knowing these expenses ahead of time). I know it pains you as you drive your shiny, half million dollar motor home, spewing rancid (expensive) diesel exhaust with a freight train sized, impressive 95db motor to have to pay me eight dollars for a permit that will give you access to any state park for the whole day. Not a bad deal when there are five state parks all within an hour to two hour distance of each other. Truckin’ retirees in yacht-sized RVs aside, the majority of tourists that hot summer were on edge. Lit cigarettes flicked at me while the driver pealed out of the park in anger for having to pay. A passenger jumping out of his car with ten other vehicles behind him while he flailed his arms and cursed me out in some Eastern European language. The passive-aggressive conservatives who could’ve sworn this was just another reason we needed to impeach the liberal Canuck that is our governor. State park employees, off-duty, falsely claiming they were visiting on business. I had it all that summer. And for some reason, it was too much.
I was heading into the second semester of my junior year, was living at home for the summer, and as always, the tension between four adults living with each other was palpable. My younger sister had only finished one semester of college and showed no interest or motivation in finding a steady job, came home at 3 or 4am which woke the dogs who in turn woke my parents and was as elusive as ever in showing emotion for anyone other than herself or her friends. Me, I just thought I should have been somewhere else by that point in my life. And I took it out not just on myself, but with my parents, as well. Not to mention the screaming and slamming door matches with the little sister. Somewhere between waking up at 6:30am to be to work for 8, four hours work til lunch, four hours work til the end of the day, home, four hours spent finding ways to entertain myself, bed at 10pm, then doing it all over again, I felt myself slipping away in my mind. In the middle of nowhere somewhere above the 45th. I felt like I had come to some sort of realisation that this is all life will ever be. Sleep, work, non-committal and obligatory quotidien amusements, then sleep again. It frightened me because I couldn’t see beyond that.
As if meant to be considering how melodramatic I am in regard to the rest of the family, crying is my only outlet. Any overwhelming or strong emotion, be it happy or sad or angry, I cry. With a mother like mine, it was the worst way to express myself and only in the last several months have we begun to communicate not just to but with each other and to understand why we are so alike and so different. The heat waves, the tourists, the not-unusual sexist comments that come from male state park workers (which I handle with aplomb, dishing it right back), my mom, my dad, my little sister, the selfish thoughts about how I wish things could’ve been better was all too much. Toward August, I was crying myself to sleep most nights, fervently desiring some fantastical change that would whisk me away from all that I thought was wrong.
Around mid-August, I was desperate for something, anything to break free from it all. I still smile at the memory of finding clarity in a day spent with my cousin’s three year old girl. She was incredibly and frighteningly smart. The kind of smart where she could follow my mom’s conversation with a neighbor about why the tractor wasn’t running and asked questions about how it worked and made conclusions from the answers that were spot on. Because of that intelligence, her parents (who weren’t exactly scientists) treated her like a young adult who couldn’t run around and laugh for no reason and daydream but instead had to act grown up. Sit down. Don’t play with that. Stop jumping around. It kills me when I see parents do that because at what other age will we ever be so free again with our imaginations and dreams and our ability to just let go and play and be ourselves?
So, I called up her mother one day and asked if I could watch her. Her mom was all too relieved to be rid of her. “Thank God.” I only rolled my eyes but was more excited about that day than I had been the entire summer. Hailey, of course, was excited, too. She knew that I equated with Mom and Dad and that meant the farm with all the animals. First thing, I told her, we’re going to go to the state park and we’re going to pretend to be tourists. Strange coming from the fact that a lot of my stresses that summer came from the park, but it was more the people in the park rather than the park itself. One of the two that I work at, the one where we were headed, is called Big Springs, or Kitch-iti-kipi. Varying and dubious sources will tell you that it is Anishnabe or Ojibwe for “big cold water” or “mirror of heaven”. While cleverly marketed by the original land owners in the early 1900s, there really is no legitimate ties to local tribes.
To describe the Springs, I can only recall it in the moments I’d visit it after hours or off-season, when you could have the raft all to yourself and the silence stretches taut between the cedars in the swamp surrounding it, the hermit thrushes with their haunting and invisible songs at dusk, the mallard ducks coming in off the lake and up the stream to where the Springs are, and the nesting pair of river otter that called the Springs their home would come out and gently play. The Springs itself is about two hundred feet across and about forty feet deep, a constant 45 degrees year round. And the color is breathtakingly, achingly clear, a bright bluish-green. Occasionally the smell of sulfur will pinch inside your nose and maybe the decay of fallen cedars. But it’s the silence that digs deep inside your chest and holds your heart calm for a while that gets me the most.
After fastening her carseat into my backseat, quick chat with her mom, we took off. She chatted on about the animals at the house and where we were going and what we were going to do. When we got to the Springs, it was busy, as usual for a Saturday and we just walked little hand in big hand around the park. She was curious about the woods and seemed kind of enchanted by them. I completely understood. As we walked down the board-and gravel walk to the dock, I mentioned that we would get some ice cream afterward (doesn’t really get messy treats at home) and would play on the swings. The stress was sloughing off of my soul and mind and my body felt less and less tense as the day went on. I lifted her up, setting her atop my bent knee that was resting on one of the railings of the dock as we peered over, our rippling images looking back and pointing at us as we pointed at the algae and fish and water bugs in the bright blue-green water. As curious about the Springs and fish as she was about how the raft worked, we got on the raft with a colorful crowd of t-shirts and shorts and flip-flops. Her attention for the water and fish as well as her enthusiasm for the crowd waned about the time we reached the other side of the Springs and by the time we came back to the dock, we were both more than ready for cold yummy ice cream and swings.
I can’t say so much that it was some inherent maternal longings that made me so comfortable that day because it was more than that with Hailey. That twenty-one year old woman and three year old little girl completely understood each other. The need and desire to just be and not be defined by the relationships with the people who surrounded us. I was me and she was Hailey. We weren’t someone’s daughter or sister that day. And it didn’t end with ice cream and clear blue-green waters and swinging high enough to touch the leaves on the trees. I didn’t want the day to end. Knowing how much she loved being at my house, I suggested that we go visit Auntie Jean and Uncle Bill and the animals and I knew that she didn’t want the day to end yet, either.
I pulled in the drive and Mom was outside working on her tractor and the dogs were barking at some invisible nuisance on the property. Mom, all-knowing goddess that she is, just smiled when she us and I think could see the change in me. I told her Haily and I were going to have a picnic in the field. I gathered up an old, ratty cotton blanket, taken from some hotel back in the days when we were on the road a lot, some juice boxes, cheese and crackers, made quick peanut butter and homemade jelly sandwiches on bread Mom just baked that morning and the two of us trekked off past the chicken coop, the peacock pen, said hello to the goats and pigs in the barn, past the antique baler and rake to a smooth spot, half way up the hill, in the field. It was a storybook day. We sat down, pushed the slobbering dogs away in vain while we tried to eat, gave up and just laid back on the blanket and talked. I asked her if she’d ever played the game of where you look at clouds and pick out shapes. It was a wonderfully perfect day with a parade of slowly moving cumulus clouds that dappled the field in shadow and sun. She stood up excitedly and wanted to show me how she learned how to leap like a frog in her pre-school class. I taught her how to twirl. We just stood, held out our arms parallel to the ground and said You have to keep your eyes open and just spin and spin and spin and when you can’t stand any longer you let yourself fall to the earth and watch the world keep spinning. It slows down after a while, just like our heartbeats, and there’s something different about how you see the world after that moment.
