I remember long open roads, golden flat fields and snow-capped mountains. Somewhere in Montana. I was about ten years old, so it must have been around 1993. Dad, Mom and I drove all the way from our house in Ventura, north of Los Angeles, to somewhere—and I can’t recall where—1,300 miles northeast in Montana. Mostly along U.S. Highway 15.
We did the drive—Dad mostly drove—in three days. I sat in the back of our sparkling green Jeep Cherokee. Dad and Mom talked in the front. Sometimes they put on the radio, or Mom listened to her country music. Mostly, I read, silent in the back. Some children’s adventure book I can no longer remember the name of, about a brother and sister who discover secret caves near the cliffs at a beach where their family is staying for summer vacation. The book made me feel safe in a way that my own life didn’t feel safe, a comforting, nurturing feeling. I kept wanting the brother and sister to flee their parents, stay in the caves permanently. But they kept returning to their family.
Eventually, after what felt like forever, Dad pulled into a parking lot which seemed to have come from out of nowhere, as if created seconds before by God himself. It was a wide black asphalt lot. It was late February, so there weren’t many other cars.
Dad parked between two thick white lines. In front of us was a series of cabins. A wooden sign said, Sawtooth Rentals. Stairs led up to a long porch and a door. Dad cut the engine. The radio died and I heard the engine clicking under the hood. Dad—his bald dome, thick prescription glasses, his piercing blue eyes—caught my gaze in the rearview mirror.
“How’s the book coming?” he said.
My mom sighed softly. She glanced out the windshield at the stairs. It had been my father’s idea to come here. For the most part, I was glad to be on a trip. Adventure always called to me. But I also missed home. I missed my friends. Montana seemed random and empty. There’d been so much blank space, miles and miles and miles of it. Not like California, with the cars and the people and the beaches and the traffic.
I shrugged, meeting my father’s eyes. “It’s fine.”
He held my eyes for a moment longer and then my mother opened her door. In wafted the smell of burning wood. It came from the chimney, where I saw smoke rising. A few slots down from the Jeep there was a gigantic Ford truck, mud flaps, tractor tires as thick as a torso, mud all over the blue body, a massive red and blue confederate flag hanging in the back window. I didn’t really know what it meant. But I had a vague feeling of unease.
We all got out and walked up the creaky stairs. Inside it was musty and barren and there were big black-and-white framed photographs of old white-haired men with huge smiles holding up the fish they’d caught, presumably in the lake which was behind the cabins. We’d be right near the water. That part excited me. I loved to fish. Dad and I would do it together. Some father-son time. A few of the photos showed several men holding Sturgeon; a couple of the ancient bottom-feeders looked to be upwards of twelve, fifteen feet long. They were like liquid dinosaurs. A tingle raced down my spine.
Dad checked in and they showed us our cabin.
Our cabin was one among many. But, due to it being off-season, the cabins on either side of us were vacant. It was very quiet. Birds chirped. There was green ripe foliage. And then the lake, blue and gray and still. We had a long narrow porch, and I stood gazing out at the lake from there for a good while when we first arrived. Across the lake there were homes and more cabins dotted along the hills. A narrow road twisted over there. A few cars passed. The lake was so calm and still it seemed like you could walk on it.
Our cabin reminded me strangely of our house in Ventura, on Colina Vista Road, in the cul-de-sac. I’d lived my whole life in that house. Dad’s royal-blue VW bug parked out on the driveway, the oil spot always there. The small front yard. The humungous fort my grandfather built me in the backyard made out of stinky two-by-fours that my friends and I played on.
The cabin had one big bed and a foldout cot. I would sleep on the cot. It was all in the same open space. No rooms. An open kitchen. A bathroom. Bare white plaster walls. It was spacious and open and empty, just like Montana. It suddenly struck me that we were far from Ventura, from California, from what I knew, from my friends and everything familiar. This made my heart pound in my chest.
I woke up the next morning with a shock, shooting up silently into a sitting position, the remnants of a nightmare rising slowly and out of my body like smoke. I looked at the green digital numbers on the clock in the kitchen by the microwave; 6:19am. It was gray-blue outside, dawn slowly waking, and I caught the faintest wisp of red-orange color.
I peeled the sleeping bag off my body. It was cold inside the cabin. I stood on the hard wooden floor. The wood was freezing against my bare feet. I shivered. I grabbed my jeans and threw them on, then my wool socks and my T-shirt and jacket. I put my hiking boots on, slowly zigzagging the laces through the cleets. When I rose again from a kneeling position I watched my parents for a moment. They were facing away from each other on the bed, Mom on the left, Dad on the right. They both slept with one side of their face against the pillow. A wide space lay between them. My father’s glasses sat on the desk next to the bed.
I silently stepped to the door and opened it. I closed the door behind me with a tiny click. I zipped my jacket up, pulled the hood over. I stood on the porch. I walked to the railing. The sun was just about to peek over the distant hills across the lake. Red, gold and orange color sprayed up and out from behind the hill but you couldn’t actually see the sun yet. I wanted to run down to the lake. I wanted to smell the water. I wanted to fish.
I watched as the sun finally lifted over the hills. The twisty narrow road beneath was empty. Everything was silent and radiant. A sun inside of me seemed to be rising along with the real sun. It was spectacular seeing that great red circle rising, showing it majesty. I looked back at our cabin seeing my parents in bed, still asleep, through the sliding glass doors. The sun was reflected in the glass, beaming arrows of light off it. I stared at the lake again, out across to the other side, to the road and hills and the red and orange and gold colors. It blew me away. For years I’d intuited—had in fact known—that childhood would one day be broken off like a ragged piece of candy, that I’d be, like everyone else, thrown to the rabid dogs of adulthood. But this. Right here. Now. This was something special and pulsing and nearly freakish. Its beauty was astounding. It made everything—all the nascent fear of the potential wild future—soften and sink.
Later that day my father and I decided to go fish down at the lake. It might have been about 4pm. We grabbed our poles and my father’s yellow tackle box, the one he’d had forever, and trundled down the narrow path through the thick foliage to the water.
Up close it was even more spectacular. My father was always so mechanical: He did what he needed to do, and then the next practical thing. I was more like my mother. She was an artist. She’d been a nurse by trade, but she’d also been a writer. She’d written articles for a national magazine for a while. She’d published a novel. Some stories. A memoir. She and my dad were polar opposites, which was what they said made their twenty-year marriage work. They “complimented” each other, my mom always said.
We walked onto a thin long pier. It was the only one around. The beach area by the water was pretty small. The water wasn’t as calm now; you could see the rhythmic movements gently up and down.
“Looks like it could rain,” my father said loudly from the end of the pier. He was setting up his pole, getting bait.
I glanced up. There was a blue sky, but there were a few fat gray clouds that seemed ominous. I hoped it wouldn’t rain. Mom said she’d cook whatever fish we caught. There was a lake my father and I fished at sometimes near Ventura called Lake Casitas in the nearby town of Ojai. We called it Lake No Fish because we caught almost nothing. My dad would rent us one of those little power boats and we’d go out for a few hours and bob around, saying little, hoping for a miracle. The miracle never came.
I baited my hook and cast. I watched my dad from the side, his thick glasses and bald head and loose beige Dockers. He wore a white sweater that said, Wimbleton on it. He was a big tennis fan. He played, too. His co-worker who’d turned him onto this cabin was a frequent tennis opponent. It was hard for me to imagine my father playing tennis. I’d never seen him play. He talked about it a lot. He watched matches on TV. I tried to imagine him holding a racket, spinning the handle, squatting with his knees bent, a bandana around his forehead, waiting for the other guy to serve.
About two hours later it was starting to get gray-blue outside. It was going to be dark soon, and it was probably going to rain. We stood at the edge of the pier with our lines still flung out into the water. My father and I had said little the whole time. He hummed to himself. I could never tell what it was he hummed. We both took swigs of water. I asked him once if he saw the cars on the road across the lake and he said yes. As always, I so badly wanted to talk to him. I mean really talk. I wanted to ask him about his own youth. What his father had been like. I’d only met my grandpa a few times. He was a busy man, some corporate CEO. I wanted to ask Dad if there’d been any women before Mom. If he’d hiked as a boy like he and I did sometimes in the mountains inland from Ventura. But my father felt somehow inaccessible. He was a man of few words. I could never tell what he was thinking. I craved being near him, his unshowered smell, his constant humming, his confusing, mysterious existence.
“Another ten minutes, maybe,” my father said.
Five minutes later it started to drizzle. Little dots hit the water and circles rippled each time. It seemed like suddenly I could smell the mucky sludge near the water’s edge, and the freshness of the forest behind us. The rain started to increase.
“We better go in,” my father said. He started reeling his line in, that scratchy sound.
“One more,” I said.
He nodded.
I lugged my line in. I made sure the bait was firmly attached. I glanced back at the forest, then lifted my eyes to the stairs and the porch and the cabins above. I turned back around, backed my arm up and flung the hardest cast I could. It was a good one. It flew far. It made that satisfying plop sound.
“Looks like no fish today, son,” he said, putting things back into the yellow tackle box.
It was really starting to rain now. I expected to hear my mom’s voice any moment, yelling from the cabin to come in before we got soaked. I squinted against the falling water. My hair and face and clothes were getting soaked. I heard the rain splashing against the lake’s surface and the patter of it against the leaves of trees behind us.
“C’mon, Jeremy,” my father said. “Reel it in. Time to go inside.”
I looked at him. I felt angry and I didn’t know why. He was only trying to be realistic. Maybe that’s why I was mad: For once, I wanted him to be impractical, unrealistic; I just wanted him to be my dad.
He started walking down the pier towards the forest to go back along the path to the cabin. I began reeling my line in slowly. I remembered that big red sun this morning. I almost grinned.
Then I felt a strong tug on my line. My heart bounced. I started reeling in harder. A second tug.
“Dad!” I screamed, rain pelting my face and eyes. My eyelashes felt leaden and heavy.
“Yeah?” he yelled back. I could tell he was almost to the path.
“I got something!”
I heard my dad drop the yellow tackle box and then his boots clomping along the pier, shaking the whole thing slightly, and his big palm was on my shoulder and I felt proud and scared. My nerves were thin. I could hardly see.
“What is it?” my father asked.
“I don’t know,” I said, pulling and tugging and reeling, my body contorting.
The rain was positively thrashing us now. Wind had started up, too. We didn’t talk. His hand stayed on my shoulder. I kept at it. Finally we saw the jerking silver body, thrashing left and right, the head and tail, and colors on the side. I pulled him up and over onto the pier. My father snagged the hook out. It was a solid foot-plus-long Rainbow Trout.
My dad smiled at me. “Good catch, son.” He placed it, still alive, in the tackle box. We moved, drenched, down the pier.
After eating the trout my mom cooked—she added Jasmine rice as a side, along with Caesar salads—we all sat at the table, full and happy. My mom seemed distant though, somewhere else in her mind. She often seemed to be somewhere else. My mom’s auburn, shoulder-length hair gleamed from the light in the kitchen. She drank red wine from a goblet. My father drank one of his Budweiser cans.
“So,” my mom said. “Are you enjoying yourself?”
I felt like shrugging, I don’t know why, but I didn’t. Often with my mom I didn’t feel comfortable being direct, telling the whole truth. Something about her made me want to rebel, want to push back, want to refuse her my truth. I couldn’t explain it. Whereas with my dad I wanted to tell him everything. But he didn’t seem interested or able to receive what I wanted to give. It was a conundrum. Sometimes the puzzle pieces of life are dangerously jagged. They can cut you if you aren’t careful.
There’d been one night, at the house in Ventura, when I was six. Dad had been out of town, on a business trip in New York City. I’d woken up at 2am and was having nightmares and couldn’t go back to sleep. I walked down the hall and woke my mom up. I asked if I could sleep with her. I got into the bed, on my dad’s side. I could still feel the indentation his big body made on the mattress. Would I ever be like him? Did I want to be?
I couldn’t sleep with mom, either. I twisted around and tried to get comfortable and I woke my mom up. Finally I left her room and went back down the hall to mine. But ten minutes later, scared again, I returned. I woke her up once more. Frustrated, she told me to get dressed. I protested. She told me to do as I was told. I dressed. She did too. She took my hand and we walked outside and got into my father’s VW bug. That old sputtering engine, the high-pitched squeal. She drove on empty surface streets in silence. We didn’t speak. I figured maybe we were just going for a drive. Then we parked in front of a house. She told me to follow her.
We walked up some red brick stairs and past a green lawn, some sprouting Birds of Paradise and White Lotus. There was a brown door. My mom knocked. A tall, thin bald man with gray eyes answered the door in a black robe.
“Jeremy, this is Dr. Richardson, my psychiatrist. You’re going to stay here tonight. I’ll pick you up tomorrow.”
“What?” I looked at my mom, confused. “Why?”
She leaned down. I smelled her bad breath and a whiff of that strong perfume she always wore. “Honey. I need to sleep. It’ll be better this way. Just be a good boy and get some rest.”
Before I could protest further she thanked Dr. Richardson, turned, and walked down the red brick steps to her car. I heard the VW engine start up and the fading sound of it moving down the road. The man took my hand and I followed him inside.
Later that night in the cabin was a moment I’ll never forget. My parents were in bed. I was on my cot. It was pitch dark. Deathly quiet had descended.
“Great catch today, Jeremy. That really was something,” Dad said. I beamed. I was radiating pride. But I didn’t speak.
“Pretty spectacular,” Mom said. “You guys got soaked.”
“It was worth it,” I said.
Dad sighed. I could envision him with his arms behind his head, elbows cocked, satisfied with himself. “I knew it was a good idea. Coming here.”
“I suppose you’re right,” Mom said. I think they were holding hands on the bed. It was an intuition. I felt slightly unnerved, embarrassed.
“One day you’ll do this with your own son,” Mom said.
This struck me as so far into the future that it was like trying to solve a complex mathematical equation far beyond my capabilities.
Some time passed in silence. Part of me wanted to sleep. Part of me wanted to run down the path to the lake. Or hike around, explore. We had two more days here, and then the long drive back home, along U.S. Highway 15. Back to California.
Suddenly my mom said, “We’re not always going to be around, you know.”
I didn’t respond. What would I have said?
“You must think we’re old now. But one day we’ll grow really old. We’ll get sick. You’ll have to help take care of us. And then one day we’ll die. We won’t be your parents anymore. Or at least we won’t be with you in the physical world. We will in spirit.”
“Honey,” my father said, very softly, almost a sound more than a word, like one of his hums. I imagined him gently placing his palm on my mom’s hand. I heard my mom breathing. I felt water on my face and I realized I was silently crying. Thin streams rivuleted down my cheeks. It was like she was suggesting that one day, far in the future, she would again leave me with a strange man. Only this time she would not return for me. I would be permanently alone.
“I think he’s asleep,” Mom said softly.
I pictured those red brick stairs. I pictured the house on Colina Vista. I pictured my friends. My mom’s words opened a portal which led to some unknown, freakish destination. I was both enthralled and terrified. It was a path, a new one, like the path which led down to the lake. I didn’t know if I had the courage to walk it.
I didn’t know if I could cast my line into the water.
Very touching and beautifully written glimpse at a memory of your childhood, Michael. Thanks for sharing this story of your relationship with your parents. There’s something to be said about those moments that stick with us throughout our lives and the effect it has on us. Your story has surely had an effect on me! Keep up the great work.