(continued)
Gramp poured himself some
coffee from his ribbed thermos and lit a cigarette. We sat there in
silence. The fog on the water was a cold woolen blanket. Every so often a
loon family called back and forth. The parts of this day I remember most
vividly these many years later are the salmon coming over the green gunnel
of the boat, gray and pink and flopping loudly at my sneakered feet; that
afternoon standing in the narrow aisle of the sporting goods store in
Sanford, the salmon behind my back on a stringer, as Gramp asked Mr.
Guilmette if he remembered that bet they’d made last week, and well, his
grandson here was going to need a new fishing rod probably, and then
turning to me and nodding to show him; and before dinner Gramp tracing the
outline of the salmon on a three-foot length of knotty pine paneling, then
filling in the details, eyes, gills, and fins, and finally adding my name
and the date caught in his florid script.
But now I find myself thinking more of
other minutes, that handful when we had just begun fishing, when he poured
himself a coffee and lit a cigarette, and we sat there as still as herons,
shrouded to our chests in chilly fog, the magic hellgrammite, stories
below, tapping its wandering code on my fingertip. It might have been a
minute; it might have been twenty minutes, or an hour; it doesn’t really
matter. It was one of those moments that somehow held still, that managed
to baffle time itself and preserve evidence of its special beauty and its
inner mystery, a moment that held you still, in a suspension with
absolutely no suspense, held you and your grandfather together, knee to
knee, in a boat of his making, over a deepness also of his making, adrift
at the very center of his world and the world of his ancestors back six
generations (the old Clark family plot, thirty miles from the boat we were
in has six headstones, three recently raised and rubbed, one of which has
my grandfather’s namesake, one my son’s, and one mine, the most
recent: “Thomas Clark: b 1734
d. 1818 Aet. 84 yrs).
Did my
grandfather sense any of these things that morning on Square Pond? Did he
think back on such moments as an old man and recognize their mute
magic? Did he, in his quiet
love of daily drama, know he was creating for me a vivid miracle from an
ordinary handful of chilly minutes?
Did his mind ever drift toward such matters of reflection? I have no idea. Nathaniel Hawthorne (who spent his
summers in Maine, like me), knew the magic the mind
could conjure in the half light at the end of day (or at its beginning),
in an ordinary room (or on a small lake). The commonplace ground of our
daily lives at certain moments in the uncertain light turns into something
more than earthly—it becomes a “Neutral Territory,” Hawthorne called it, where the Actual and
the Imaginary meet and each imbue itself with the other. The ordinary
becomes extraordinary, the banal turns enchanted, and for some of those in
its midst, it stays that way, forever.
Such was that moment in the boat with
my grandfather. I hope it was the same for him too. We can never know the secret
things our grandparents, our parents, our partners did with their bodies,
where they took them, how they used them, bent them, broke them, nurtured
them before we came along and were too shy to ask. Neither can we really
know the magic places their minds took them. We can only guess, and we
must guess from the scattered glimpses we’ve gathered of them—as though
we were watching five cents’ worth of their daily lives in the flickering
light of an old nickelodeon in a penny arcade somewhere. Old memories,
letters, and a hatbox half full of photos all arranged into a ragged
narrative, elusive, indistinct—and from which you carry away the
ineffaceable memory of a single frame, two, three, five of them maybe (a
Viking funeral, Gorgeous George at night below marching ants and the smell
of maple syrup, an old man in a boat with a boy). At times, sometimes,
small things suffice. They let you guess the
rest.
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