The last 10 days have been ones of exploration and anxiety and wonder. Packing up the pop-up camper and the one-eyed dog, we headed back east, driving the northern routes through Indiana and Ohio and Pennsylvania for the first time in 17 years, the last being on our move out from Connecticut to Wisconsin. It is an odd direction for Americans - or at least me - to move. Americans go West for adventure and camping. The land opens up to big skies and then to big mountains and vast scenery. Going east, the land tightens as smaller mountains and the increasing lushness of forests hedge one in. But until Springfield, Massachusetts, all went shockingly well. We camped in Ohio and twice in NY state, and the campsites were all good and uncrowded. Poison Ivy made its first appearance, but we knew poison ivy. We also knew the closeness of the damp forests, which had so long been my home, and marveled at the miles and miles of woods, of uncut swaths that ran up and over mountain after mountain. We even stopped at Niagara Falls and were not disturbed by the commercialism. As the Niagara River increased its downward trajectory, it fell with awesome power, at times right below our feet. This, too, was not too crowded. The weather was always good in day, and when rain fell at night on the canvass of the pop-up, it served as a lullaby.
As we hit I -91 on our last leg into CT., the road became a moving parking lot, the power and ceaselessness comparable to the Falls, and at one point, a car careened in front of us and hit the concrete divider in the left lane, blowing out tires and scrapping the sides before it careened back and off an exit. We were brought near death, but we escaped and finally rolled into my brother's place in CT, where we had all grown up. Here, we were nearer death than before, because that is what the trip was all about.
It was about two deaths, really: one, to release my mother's ashes in Long Island Sound where she had grown up, and another to honor the death of our long-time friend Bill, who had died just two months earlier at the age of 61. That Saturday evening, we let her remains go in the sound, the cloud they made shocking to me. So much had been left! I had thought there would be a little pile of dark ash, but instead there were several pounds of white pebbles and lumps which had once been bone, and they lingered in the sound as if unwilling to finally let go. Go, go! I urged. The remains reminded me too much off what really had happened this side of the spiritual divide, of the reality of death and its gross finality, leaving me confused and conflicted. Death is not only spiritual for us, but a reminder of how fragile our bodies and our lives really are.
Next day was for Bill, beginning at noon. In honor of Bill, his widow had brought a boat load of good beer, and I dove into it with a little too much relish at first. Along with my younger brother who was throwing the bash, I was nervous about the people I would meet, many for the first time in 40 years. Bill had linked us all from the heady days of my brother's bands, where Bill was always present, to my old high school crowd, many who had been lost to time and circumstance so long ago. And boy, did they come. For each, time flashed back to when I had last seen them, to what they were and what I was then - and was no longer. One guy said, "That's your wife? I wouldn't have believed you would ever marry or stay married. You were such a rambling guy! (read, unreliable bum.) And such it was throughout, all of us clicking back to when we had last seen each other, then clicking forward to access just who and what was before us. None of us were the same, and not just in appearance. Life had changed us all, some for better, some (apparently) for worse, but most for better; for friendlier and safer and less competitive. My brother had actually tensed waiting for a certain guy and his brother who had left one of his bands after physical blows. He had been a tough guy, a roofer who was hard as nails sober and a real danger after drinking. But he had now been changed into a harmless old man who stuck to drinking seltzer water. It was all so different.
And everywhere, amid the smiles and laughs and memories, was the presence of death. Our changes would be nothing compared to what was to come, to what had already come to Bill. When the crowd was nearly gone 6 hours later, Bill's widow hugged me as if for dear life and cried - and cried and cried. I did not know what to do but feel the emptiness and the disbelief and the loneliness that death brings. It had been there with my mother the night before, and now clung to me in the form of a distraught, traumatized woman. Death - the greatest and harshest teacher of any life, no matter how great or harsh it had been. We had been made near-equal with age, and now stood before the greatest equalizer of them all; all of us together, and most certainly for the last time, because next time, many of us would no longer walk the fields and woods anywhere ever again.
The ride back was good, disbelief leveling off as the road brought us west again, back to great open farmland and straight roads. But the snapshots, the jolts and changes of time, clung for longer than I would have thought. It is so clear that it is all a dream, a beautiful and harsh dream, that one day we simply wake from, step out of. One day, a tough guy; another a gentle old man; and another, gone, gone, leaving someone to cry and others to stand before a truth that we simply cannot bear. FK
As we hit I -91 on our last leg into CT., the road became a moving parking lot, the power and ceaselessness comparable to the Falls, and at one point, a car careened in front of us and hit the concrete divider in the left lane, blowing out tires and scrapping the sides before it careened back and off an exit. We were brought near death, but we escaped and finally rolled into my brother's place in CT, where we had all grown up. Here, we were nearer death than before, because that is what the trip was all about.
It was about two deaths, really: one, to release my mother's ashes in Long Island Sound where she had grown up, and another to honor the death of our long-time friend Bill, who had died just two months earlier at the age of 61. That Saturday evening, we let her remains go in the sound, the cloud they made shocking to me. So much had been left! I had thought there would be a little pile of dark ash, but instead there were several pounds of white pebbles and lumps which had once been bone, and they lingered in the sound as if unwilling to finally let go. Go, go! I urged. The remains reminded me too much off what really had happened this side of the spiritual divide, of the reality of death and its gross finality, leaving me confused and conflicted. Death is not only spiritual for us, but a reminder of how fragile our bodies and our lives really are.
Next day was for Bill, beginning at noon. In honor of Bill, his widow had brought a boat load of good beer, and I dove into it with a little too much relish at first. Along with my younger brother who was throwing the bash, I was nervous about the people I would meet, many for the first time in 40 years. Bill had linked us all from the heady days of my brother's bands, where Bill was always present, to my old high school crowd, many who had been lost to time and circumstance so long ago. And boy, did they come. For each, time flashed back to when I had last seen them, to what they were and what I was then - and was no longer. One guy said, "That's your wife? I wouldn't have believed you would ever marry or stay married. You were such a rambling guy! (read, unreliable bum.) And such it was throughout, all of us clicking back to when we had last seen each other, then clicking forward to access just who and what was before us. None of us were the same, and not just in appearance. Life had changed us all, some for better, some (apparently) for worse, but most for better; for friendlier and safer and less competitive. My brother had actually tensed waiting for a certain guy and his brother who had left one of his bands after physical blows. He had been a tough guy, a roofer who was hard as nails sober and a real danger after drinking. But he had now been changed into a harmless old man who stuck to drinking seltzer water. It was all so different.
And everywhere, amid the smiles and laughs and memories, was the presence of death. Our changes would be nothing compared to what was to come, to what had already come to Bill. When the crowd was nearly gone 6 hours later, Bill's widow hugged me as if for dear life and cried - and cried and cried. I did not know what to do but feel the emptiness and the disbelief and the loneliness that death brings. It had been there with my mother the night before, and now clung to me in the form of a distraught, traumatized woman. Death - the greatest and harshest teacher of any life, no matter how great or harsh it had been. We had been made near-equal with age, and now stood before the greatest equalizer of them all; all of us together, and most certainly for the last time, because next time, many of us would no longer walk the fields and woods anywhere ever again.
The ride back was good, disbelief leveling off as the road brought us west again, back to great open farmland and straight roads. But the snapshots, the jolts and changes of time, clung for longer than I would have thought. It is so clear that it is all a dream, a beautiful and harsh dream, that one day we simply wake from, step out of. One day, a tough guy; another a gentle old man; and another, gone, gone, leaving someone to cry and others to stand before a truth that we simply cannot bear. FK
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