We do alright here,
Sitting as we do
Between sea and mountain.
Winter, at its worst,
Marcescent.
The water fine bourbon.
The streets platinum,
Polished so not slick.
It rains white wine.
The air smells of gardenia
And triggers intense nostalgia
As you concoct
Beautiful futures.
The hounds sing
Opera.
“Dad, I know I had a dream that I was in real life one time.”
–Cerys Weylyn Davis
It’s been a while since the kids and I had a road trip on our own. A few years ago we were pretty restless and quasi-professionals at this sort of thing, despite a urinary incident here and there (See: The Great West Tennessee Urinary Incident https://wordpress.com/post/jbrettdavis.wordpress.com/26). So we were overdue for another one when we started off, the three of us, from Durham to Ohio for Memorial Day weekend. Within an hour and a half on the road, we stopped three times, ate twice, cried once, “cough-burped” to a concerning extreme a dozen times, listened to “We Are the World” five times (thank you, Wiley Elementary for introducing this into my son’s life), and stopped at the most horrific bathroom in the southeast (be warned, it’s off I-40 near the Greensboro airport) where I had my first claustrophobic panic attack when the door knob turned without any corresponding reaction on the part of the latch bolt.
After extricating ourselves from the gas station bathroom portal to hell, we pulled back onto the highway. Cerys, unfazed by our near brush with permanent semi-solitary confinement, asked, “What’s the environment?” to which Harlan replied “It’s that thing we live in!” And that triggered the first of many admonitions from Cerys not to use plastic straws because they get stuck in turtles’ noses. She talked without pause for the next thirty minutes, kicking the back of my seat until she got my attention. “Dad, I know I had a dream that I was in real life one time.” And then she was asleep.
Harlan, the anti-Rip Van Winkle, refused to sleep due to fear of not listening to We Are the World enough times in a day. We trudged on and Cerys woke up asking repeatedly when would we be in Virginia, followed by when would we be in West Virginia, and finally by when we gonna be in Ohio. It wasn’t long before we got stuck in a miles-long traffic jam where the highway went down to one lane through the last tunnel at the Virgina-West Virginia line — an enlarged prostate with a million other Yankee expats trying to get north through the narrow urethra of I-77.
I had an opportunity for one more bout of claustrophobia at a Sam’s Hot Dog Stand outside Charleston, West Virginia. The entire building was about 15’ x 15’. The bathroom was big enough to wash your hands, sit on the commode, rest your head on the door, order a hot dog and play a conveniently located game of video poker all at the same time. As the kids settled in, I looked around for possible escape routes — no drop ceiling so no way to climb out that way. Luckily the door opened, even though Harlan insisted on locking it (clearly unaware of the great danger of us spending the rest of our lives in there).
We finally arrived at my parents’ farm at 11:00 at night to my dad, dutifully sitting by the smoker where sixty pounds of pork sat smoking for my niece’s graduation party. I sat beside him, the nearly full moon lighting up the mist, whippoorwills making their racket in the pine forest and the intoxicating whiff of honeysuckle in the air. As if no stress ever existed, this spot on the side of the hill cradled me. As if no words ever needed to be spoken, I looked up at the stars through holes in the fog, my claustrophobic episodes a distant memory. The kids were inside with my mom beginning their farm tradition of eating enough sugar to kill an elephant and fighting sleep at all costs. All was well. We had made it to the wide open spaces of the farm.
And next time, it’s my wife’s turn.
We don’t eat lizards unless they’re roasted and I don’t like roasted lizards. And pumpkins do not eat lizards.
I saw a doorway that didn’t have a door in a tree before. Maybe the door just fell off. Maybe from the hurricane we had a few weeks ago. I don’t know why I was wearing my pink jacket. It’s not a rain jacket.
— My daughter, budding naturalist
I just returned from the mountains. I went up there to clear my head, freeze my arse off in a tent, and hopefully catch at least a fish. A few days before, I drove through the dark after a full day of work and the temperature kept dropping. Good thing I brought a sleeping bag. Unfortunately, it was my summer bag. I arrived at the campground on the Ravens Fork about 9:30 and 40 degrees.
As I lay in the tent, all the usual feelings and thoughts that happen when you find yourself away from the family for a weekend then happened. Feeling guilty. Wondering what they are doing. Feeling guilty about feeling guilty. Getting mindful by deep breathing. Losing track of being mindful and having a thought spasm. Forgetting what the thought spasm was about. Feeling better when thinking about the river a few feet away. Being disturbed I can’t see the river — just the building white noise of it — sounding like it’s rising. Is it raining up the mountain? Hearing wind in the rhododendron and mountain laurel on the far bank. Shivering. Wondering why there were so many crows around my site. Pondering raven symbolism. Are they really a sign of bad luck? What does this mean for my fishing? For my safety? After 30 minutes exhausting myself in reaction to all the sylvan peace, deciding to go ahead and try to sleep.
As you might expect, the night did not get warmer. The wind blew through the tent. My face got cold to the point that sniffing was useless. I slept. For an hour here and there. Before I knew it, it was time to get up. I was on the river by 6:00 am — not because the fishing is good when it’s still dark and 35 degrees but because I couldn’t bear another painful shiver in the tent.
One of my favorite traditions of fly fishing is getting my fly caught in a tree within the first five casts. It helps balance me out and keeps me from over-romanticizing the sport. After losing my first fly in the tree behind me, my fingers didn’t want to bend enough to tie a knot. Another fly fishing tradition of mine is when I focus on tying a knot with line as thin as a spider web for long enough that my eyes completely focus in and then I think there has to be a predator taking advantage of my inattention so I need to look up. But when I look up it’s all blurry. I know a sasquatch is going to be staring right at me one of these times my eyes refocus. This time, though, there was no skunk ape — only a large pile of elk poop. Steaming. How did I not notice that? Did an elk just now pop a squat in front of me?
I’d like to tell you that the fish started crushing it at this point. But they did not. I walked upriver, casting when I saw a good spot that might hold fish. In fact, I walked the Ravens Fork half a day and the Tuckaseegee the other half and I didn’t catch a fish. But I did take a lunch break to go get a warmer sleeping bag.
I was about to call it at about 5:00 when I decided to use a “junk food” fly, the mop fly. The mop fly is called this because it can be tied with a mop string or a piece of a shag carpet. It’s not your Hollywood, “River Runs Through It,” artfully-tied dry fly. And almost instantly I hooked what looked like the biggest trout I’ve ever caught. After a full day of fishing minuscule larval stage bugs, I hooked one on a fly that could have previously been a bathroom rug. As quickly as I hooked it, I lost it. But I was buzzing at that point. I casted again and actually landed the biggest trout I ever caught. It jumped four times. I snapped a quick picture while it was still in the water and it took off back to the depths.
I walked down river, head high, taking it all in. I found this perch where two boulders jutted out from opposite sides of the stream and made a raging waterfall. I stood on one of the rocks watching the Cherokee water make its way downstream. I looked at the rocks, the lichens, the whitewater going green in the middle of the pool and crystal clear in the shallows. I wondered to myself how do people not think God is in everything? It was a moment. The type of moment where everything is ideal and you imagine yourself from above bathed in golden light.
And then I fell in. I mean I fell in. My head went under. I was safe — I had a wading belt on. I crawled out. Looked around. At least nobody saw it.
Humbled by the river and innervated by the interaction with the 20-inch rainbow trout I was so privileged to hold, I went back to my campsite. As I fell asleep that night, my mind raced a little less. The wind picked up. The Tennessee mom and her daughter at the site next to me kept squirting lighter fluid into the fire and the sides of my tent illuminated. I thought back to my daughter, pontificating on the porch. I don’t know why I brought my pink sleeping bag. It was not a summer bag.
“And the sabbath rang slowly, In the pebbles of the holy streams.” — Dylan Thomas
I just finished a book by Chris Dombrowski. “Body of Water,” it’s called and it’s the story of a pioneering Bahamian bonefish guide, a thoughtful take on a man with an innate sense of being in the world and a relic in a new reality. A fishing guide, he observes, is a person who “dedicates one’s self to the occupation of being creaturely.” It was one of those books I read slowly so it wouldn’t end.
Being creaturely is something I’ve aspired to since I was a kid. Walking on the lakeside trail at Lake Vesuvius with my Grandpa Dave, my brother and I would walk as quietly as we could, heel to toe, like the Shawnee we had read about. I wasn’t so much Tecumseh as an awkward Howdy Doody in braces. That simple act changed me and I go back to that walking meditation even now, over 30 years later. Walking as an animal made the woods come alive with possibilities. You become something more than yourself. You become part of a world still foreign.
I found a creek on a map recently. I mean, I didn’t find it. It’s been there for thousands of years. But it was new to me. Dutch Creek in Valle Crucis. In an earlier phase of my life, I lived a mile from this stream and didn’t ever engage it. I was more focused on the more obviously magnificent Watauga River it spills into right near the Methodist church I attended. Man, I tell you what, I didn’t know what I was missing. The little creek I drove over every day that looked like a ditch was a world unto itself. It comes down the mountain through Valle Crucis, the valley of the cross. The upper valley of Valle Crucis is an enchanted place where three creeks — Dutch Creek, Clarks Creek, and Crab Orchard Creek — come together and form what people say is the shape of a cross. Dutch Creek starts off way up at the base of Hanging Rock and winds through deep woods where I’m sure the creatures range from bears to toothy, undiscovered species of gnomes before it meanders through the farms of the upper valley. I’m talking the kind of gnomes that only come out certain nights of the year and wreak havoc on the houses in the valley, stomping around gardens and leaving odd footprints on car hoods. I have a theory about these gnomes also existing in the hills around Blacksburg, Virginia but that’s a story for another day.
After finding it on the map, I went there to fish it with my fellow fisher-in-crime, Philip. Coming off a night at the Boone Saloon, we haphazardly made our way up the mountain scouting the stream a little later than I would have liked. We found Dutch Creek Falls. We found a couple dead ends. We found a pile of scat from what animal I had no idea. This animal relieved itself on a rock right in the middle of a stream, not so much an act of desecration as one of pure nonchalant freedom. Had it been human it would have been another thing entirely. The creek was so small up there it didn’t look like it held any fish; or if it did, there was no way to keep from spooking them, especially in our haggard Saturday morning sasquatch states. We moved on.
On the way back down the mountain we almost didn’t stop. Something made us. There was a sign on a tree put up by the nearby Holy Cross Episcopal congregation. It was marked private but the signs made it known that anglers were welcome. Good vibes from the beginning. Good enough vibes that I wasn’t even phased by my friend having forgotten his fishing rod. Who forgets their fishing rod when they go fishing? Reminds me of a time my college roommate and I went out to mountain bike some trails outside of Athens, Ohio. We were totally psyched to be getting off campus. We arrived at the trailhead only to realize that in our excited haste we forgot our bikes back at the dorm.
This stream commands reverence. You approach it like a prayer. The grasses and wildflowers grow so thick on the banks it becomes a tunnel in spots. The thing about fishing a stream like this is you have to be stealthy. Truthfully, I was feeling about as stealthy as a rabid dog in a culvert. We walked up the stream, spooking trout as we went, seeing them dart upstream alerting every trout in the area that idiots were about.
This was a joint effort, being that we had one rod. Turns out, I like that kind of fishing. Fishing by committee. Fishing in consultation with a good friend of the same skill level, which is to say we catch fish wherever we go but we aren’t getting sponsored by Howler Brothers any time soon. One of us would hand off the rod to the other. We stopped when we saw a trout upstream. We whispered. We crouched. It was my turn. Philip stood downstream while I crawled on all fours upsteam. The banks were close enough to stretch your arms and touch both sides and the trees so low over the stream you had to duck.
Moments like this make an angler jittery. The anticipation can easily ruin it if you can’t keep it together. I pulled some line off the reel and made a twitchy false cast. My caddis fly imitation landed right downstream of the trout and left a wake. Fail. But I cast again, this time right on the fish’s nose. It wasn’t a delicate presentation but BLAM the trout ate my fly right as it landed. I imagine the sound of a toilet flushing every time this happens. Fluhdoooosh. Fuhloooonk. Something like that. Not really a bucolic image that one typically associates with fly fishing in god’s country but it goes through my head nevertheless. I raised the rod and pulled the fish to hand. A beautiful little wild rainbow.
There’s something about this moment when a fish comes to hand. I get a sort of tunnel vision. If I’m not careful, I will forget to breathe. I remind myself to take it all in. The black spine turns olive green and then to silver with pink spots and the reddish stripe of the lateral line (the lateral line being the organ that allows a fish to detect movement, sounds, pressure changes, and idiots trotting up the stream). I always take a moment to look in its eye. This is a survivor with ancestors going back to the ice age. But it’s not from this area. It’s an immigrant just as I am. Only the brook trout are native. But this moment. You are temporarily part and parcel to the environment. You have found a stream, observed it, waded in, observed some more, and finally decided to take action. Your reward is the acute sense of being a creature in the world. You get the privilege of being part of it. You release it by opening your hand so you can feel it muscle out. Back to its world and you to yours. But you’re changed. You’re walking again like the Shawnee. Not a day older in your mind than you were back in the days before life became more complicated and before you became so focused on matters besides being “creaturely” in a world unrealized.
“Forever don’t mean much in passing and forgotten don’t mean that it’s done.” — Richard Dobson
These song lyrics hit me the other day as I was listening to Guy Clark’s version of “For Ever, For Always, For Certain.” The combination of Dobson’s lyrics and the emotional rasp of Guy Clark’s delivery is one of country music’s best moments in my humble opinion. The lyrics have stuck with me since I first heard them.
One of my earliest memories is of my uncle Jim helping me ride my first bike. It was Christmas and my uncle and I were outside my house on the corner of 6th and Heplar Streets in Ironton, Ohio. It was the 1970s, which year I have no idea. There might have been a “Jack Davis for City Council” sign in the yard. I think I was wearing polyester frog pants and an Ohio State t-shirt. I’m pretty sure Uncle Jim had on a collar he could scratch his back with by turning quickly. I remember the sound and feel of plastic training wheels on the concrete sidewalk. I remember it being cold and gray. I remember the smell of tar. I remember the Kentucky smokestacks across the river. I remember the helping hand of my uncle. For no ascertainable reason, this memory pops up from time to time.
Recently I was walking Harlan and Cerys to the park near our house — Harlan on his new scooter and Cerys on her not-so-new bike tricked out with a new baby carrier. I was distracted — things to be done around the house and work the next day. Cerys was talking about leaf fairies and how well they can hide because they have leaves in their hair and Harlan was recounting a story about getting bitten by a chicken and escaping only to be bitten by a jungle bird.
Then I had that memory again. The bike and the training wheels. I looked down at Cerys’s training wheels rolling over gravel and Harlan’s crouched-over scooter stance and I realized this could be that moment they remember — that fleeting memory that will come back to them at unexpected times of their lives. The one that returns while sitting in a college class, waking up on vacation in another country, washing a dish, or even while walking their own kids down an alley on an uneventful day, this could be that memory flash. Our memories are more than nostalgia. They make us who we are. The irony of memories is you have more when you’re younger. I just now forgot what I used to remember and what else I was going to say about that.
My kids are now at the age of retaining memories. What will they remember about me? Am I living up to the image of the father figure I always expected myself to be? I’ve thought of a few things they might remember about me, in no certain order:
Perhaps this is not the noblest of lists. It’s tempting as a parent to try to create perfect memories for the kids. Really, though, I suspect I have very little control over it. All I can do is be there. The memory fairy strikes when it dang well pleases and it has leaves for hair so you can never see it until it’s gone.
I moved to Texas because of a river. More accurately, I moved because of my wife’s job. But I did fish the San Marcos River on an exploratory visit there and told myself I’d move if I caught a Guadalupe bass. Blam. Caught one. The San Marcos was a great introduction to Texas water — an emerald jewel running through ranchland near Seguin. My guide, Christopher Adams from Gruene Outfitters, told me it was told to him that the bass start biting when the temperature hits 100 and the cicadas start singing. They did. On queue. My addiction was born. So it should have come as no surprise to me that I would fall in love with a Texas River.
There’s nothing wrong with all the greatness of Austin. Nightlife. Music vibes. Youth amidst rock and country royalty. An unique spot on earth — a southern and slightly westerly town. And there is so much more to my experience of Texas. Pedernales. Hill country. Waters of the Edwards aquifer. I was lucky to have happened on the Pedernales and it is why I will go back to Texas. It pulls you in.
Water is the thing I least expected to find in Texas. Clear limestone spring water bubbling up from the aquifer and running, pooling and dropping the canyon floor down to the Colorado River. It’s heavenly. Seriously, I might have imagined heaven like this at a young age. If you disregard the extreme heat, rattlesnakes, coral snakes, tarantulas, fire ants and coyotes, it is even more so. But I know they too have their place. Just because they predate me doesn’t affect their integrity.
The river I miss most in Texas? The Pedernales. It is constant. I hear it has nearly dried up in years past but not this year. It was at a healthy flow when I was in the area from November through June. In fact, it was often too high to fish. I found this river almost by accident when looking for a new place to fish. I took Harlan and Cerys there and we walked the rocky banks. As I recall it was hot. For November at least.
The Pedernales is pronounced Pur-Duh-NAH-luss by locals. I have no idea why. But that’s how it is and you don’t really press too hard for an answer to why they pronounce things the way they do, not because they are belligerent or unfriendly but because there is no logic. It becomes a feedback loop of “that’s just how you say it.”
The river flows over a hundred miles of Texas hill country from Kimble County to where it joins the Colorado River at Lake Austin. I mainly fished it where it flows through Milton Reimer’s Ranch. Along that little stretch I caught largemouth bass, smallmouth bass, Guadalupe bass, white bass, gar and several types of sunfish. The river flows through a canyon here and when you come up on the canyon’s edge, you see this clear-to-green ribbon of water down in the valley and you just want to take flight to take it all in. Once you descend the canyon walls and wade in, it’s unnerving to see prehistoric-looking gar feeding on top of the water as buffalo carp lumber upstream in the deep water in front of you, barely visible in the green depth. And the snakes. There are diamondback rattlesnakes and coral snakes, neither of which I ever saw. The fact that my local fly shop had more than one fly pattern based on the tarantula had me a bit worried; although, I never saw one of those either. Something about the whole place made me expect to see a sleestack on the rim of the canyon any minute.
These days, I’m living back in North Carolina and we have a whole different set of watersheds and streams here with their own positives and perils. I look back on rivers like people. I miss their personalities. I miss specific times I spent with them. The best part about this is there is no shortage of rivers or people no matter where I go. So life is looking pretty good here in the dark days of winter — despite my distance from the instant therapy of the Pedernales.
Happy kidney stone season! It’s the dog days of summer. Actually, those days just ended. The ancient Greeks called the end of July through early August the “dog days” because the nose of Canis Major, Sirius, would rise in the sky just before the sunrise. So you have no excuse to by lying around like a lazy dog in the Carolina heat. Get out there and get dehydrated. The ancient Roman festival of Volturnalia, the river god, is coming up later this week. Get out on a river, avoid harmful amoebas, and enjoy the last days of the harvest. Because autumn is hiding in the forest and it’s about to show itself. Any day now yellow leaves will show up on the sides of the highways. First, it comes for the poplars.
You see, mortality is on my mind like it is every year of this time. I love summer. I mourn it before it even leaves. Just look at the fields. The late summer wildflowers are at their peak. Most pastures are on their last or next to last hay cutting. There’s something both jubilant and depressing about it.
Maybe I am just thinking this because I almost blew myself up a few weeks ago. Not on purpose but through a distinct lack of brainpower while hooking up the dryer in our new (100-year-old, rather) house. I’ve been thinking about it a lot at 3:30 in the morning. I recently heard a quote and I can’t figure out who said it. Now I can’t remember the quote. Oh. Something like “every man is a coward at 3:30 in the morning.” Perhaps it is worse this time of year. The season of darkness is right around the corner.
Who of us has not had both elation and despair in August?
My kids had a bit of both this week. School is about to start. In our house, this year, that means it’s vaccination season. YAY! It’s a momentous time for our family also because Harlan is going to kindergarten. But wait, he’s not ready! He can’t even wipe himself properly! His diet of sugar, ketchup and occasional meat products has left him smaller than the other 5-year-olds. Are they guarding the doors? Look, I try not to be a helicopter parent or lawnmower parent or whatever they call it now (“they” being those people who guilt you no matter whether you hold your kid’s hand across the street or catapult him across via medieval war implement).
So we got behind on the old jabs, the shots, the vaccinations, whatever you want to call them. I needed to get them caught up or else concoct some sort of fictitious religious belief to sneak past the Wake County school administrators. Verdukianism, anyone?
That’s why we were at the doctor’s office this week. The kids were elated. They’ve been talking about shots for weeks. They knew they had one more round of shots before going to school. So they’ve been playing up the whole “I get a treat after shots” thing. Harlan wanted a sticker, chocolate milk, and a sucker. Cerys wanted a litany of sweets, “unitorns,” and other various mythical characters — a list too long to cite here.
We walked into the waiting room and they immediately walked up to the biggest kid and asked him what he was in for. He looked at me like “should I respond?” but before he could, Harlan informed him that he was there for his last shots. AND he was getting a treat. AND he knew all the Pokemon characters on the poor kid’s shirt. Cerys ran circles around the kid as Harlan shook him down with conversation. Lucky for him, he got called back. The kid about ran from the waiting room to whatever awaited him back there in the doctor’s lair.
Finally the nurse called their names. They ran behind her almost stepping on her heals. She weighed them. Harlan insisted he go first, the opposite of what he would do 10 minutes later when the shots showed up.
Then she left us in the room. Their energy started to wane a bit as minutes passed. The thrill of future treats was beginning to pale as they took in their surroundings. The medical waste disposal bins on the wall, the stainless steel trays with the cotton-tipped sticks and tongue depressors they couldn’t touch. The short stool on wheels occupied them until Harlan spun Cerys off into the wall.
Things got quiet. We sat there listening to cart after cart coming down the hall outside the closed door. As each one got closer, Harlan would yell “she’s almost here!” and Cerys would shriek. Another cart came down the hall. Not the one. It was getting tortuous. And then there was another one — slower than the others as it approached our door. No shrieking or commenting this time. They were frozen, eyes fixed on the door. It opened. There she was. The nurse with the tray of four syringes. Things went south at that moment. Harlan suddenly became chivalrous and pushed Cerys to the front. There was crying. Screaming. I remember holding them down, one at a time. And then it was over. Four little pink legs covered in Candy Land and Incredible Hulk band-aids.
We walked down the hall and Harlan, like a seasoned pro, greeted a little girl having her blood pressure taken. “I don’t have to get any more shots until I’m 11!” Cerys, not watching where she was going, knocked the sucker basket off the table and we all walked out. Freshly vaccinated and not a bit jaded. Suckers in hand and smiling big August grins.
There’s a moral in there somewhere — maybe even one that makes me feel better about the end of summer. As for now, though, enjoy these last days of the harvest! And don’t forget Volturnalia.
It’s a long drive from Texas to North Carolina — so long I had a wound heal on it. Part of that is due to the rural route I insisted we drive. My idea was to drive the Mississippi Blues Trail. I’ve thought about the place since I was in high school and first heard Robert Johnson’s haunted voice and ethereal slide guitar. I think my kids are old enough to start remembering stuff. Hopefully they won’t hold this against me. We could have driven along the Gulf Coast and stopped at a beach. So for better or worse, I picked a few sites in northwestern Mississippi that drew me in. They all happened to be either birthplaces or graves.
BB King’s birthplace off of Bear Creek. Cerys: “Where’s the little BB baby, dad?”
Charley Patton’s grave in Holly Ridge. Harlan: “Daaaaaad why are we out here in all this corn? Are we LOST?”
Robert Johnson’s grave outside Greenwood. “Dad, what’s in a grave? PEOPLE??? How do they get out? What happens if YOU get in a grave?” I started driving very carefully.
In a larger sense, what a journey this last year has been. It was a massive effort to pivot from a law practice to being a full-time dad. Now that I am on the other side of it, let me tell you, it was a privilege. I learned who my kids are. I learned who I am. I learned that we are always changing. The growth chart on the wall is the best visualization. They grew inches while we were in Texas.
I learned that if a 5-year-old licks the table at McDonalds, he’s likely to get sick. Two days later. Just as my paranoid google search — “Siri, how long is the incubation period for the flu?” — predicted.
I learned a lot of songs from cartoons that will likely require years of therapy and meditation to exorcise from my brain. Bubble Guppies, anyone?
I learned the best thing and the worse thing about having kids — kids. At some point your little baby turns into a jerk. It’s true. You think it and you feel guilty for having thought it. But when your son throws his macaroni and cheese on the floor because he wanted “the kind that wasn’t already made,” he is being a jerk. I also learned that if you stay calm, they come back around and ingratiate themselves to you. He smiles at me and I forget that anything else in the world exists but for that little ray of pure happiness pointing straight at me.
I learned that the Guadalupe bass on the San Marcos River start biting when the temperature goes over a hundred degrees and the cicadas start buzzing.
I learned Bastrop is pronounced “Bass Drop.” And that Manchaca is pronounced “Man Chack.” Gruene is “Green.” And Humble is “Umm Bull.”
As prevalent as the concept of TEXAS was wherever we looked a week ago, our reality is completely devoid of Texas at this point. I see no Texas flags. No longhorns emblazoned on every bumper. No Texas palms. No Texas live oaks. No crystal-clear, aquifer-fed streams. No white dirt and rocks.
Except our stay in Texas changed us. Texas is still with us. I walk differently than I did eight months ago and it’s only partially because of the back pain from picking Harlan and Cerys up thirty times a day. I walk with the sense that these two wondrous little creatures are beside me and part of me at all times. As a dad, I did not feel the connection to our newborns. I don’t know if other dads felt this and I feel guilty for saying it. But I didn’t carry the kids for 12 months or however long the whole gestation thing was. (Thanks, Karla, you’re the best, by the way.) I didn’t have all that time of having the little human kicking inside me to get to feel its existence in a psychic sense. After spending the entire last eight months with them 24/7 I feel more than an observer. I’m a participant in their lives. Messy as that can be. (Sorry about all the puking and nosebleeds in your house this week, Chad and Lindsay, but you’re real troopers for giving us a place to stay.)
So here we are again. Our little family. Back in a place and surrounded by people we love. It just so happens that what could have been a real catastrophe turned into a flow of positivity. Thank you to everyone who has participated in this journey with us. We’re just getting started so watch out!
Something’s in the air. Not birds.
I’m talking about the cosmos. The coyotes have stopped howling in my part of Travis County. Someone took a picture of a gator in the Guadalupe River down by San Marcos. Lady Bird Lake has whitewater rapids. Something is in retrograde. Like a planet. I don’t know what that means but I heard someone say it the other day. Like “sheeeew, man, I’m so glad Mercury is out of retrograde. That was a close one.” I generally nod approval at times like this and look up as if to show my understanding that the planets are indeed “up” in direction.
But then something else odd happened. Automatic sliding doors stopped opening for me. Do you know how embarrassing it is when an automatic door that doesn’t open for you? You’re trying to get out the door and nearly walk into it when you realize the guy who works there is looking at you, grinning. You try walking back up to the door waving your arms and puffing your chest up to be bigger. It happens that way sometimes. It happened to me this week. Similarly, my mom can’t wear watches because they stop working on her wrist. I’m that way with automatic doors. But only now and then. It seems they know when I’m vulnerable. They know when something’s in retrograde.
I was in two places this month where the music suddenly stopped and everything went weird. At a Mexican restaurant the loud mariachi music went silent. All you could hear were utensils on plates. People looked around like they might be having a medical emergency, sticking their fingers in their ears.
I was at the X Games at the Circuit of the Americas with my son, Harlan, when the music stopped too. In a crowd of thousands. Dead quiet. No one happened to be talking at the moment the music stopped. We just stood there looking at each other. Then we went back to the only part of the X Games that seemed to captivate my son — Twiggy the waterskiing squirrel.
I don’t know what this has to do with anything but I do know that it’s weird. And what else is weird is how we communicate sometimes. Someone told me his son was 17 months old the other day. So about a year and a half. I told him my son was 1 foot 29 inches tall.
My daughter, Cerys, was talking a lot the other day as she tends to do when she is not sleeping.
“Bink, stop talking please.”
“But making sounds is how we hug.”
“Bink, please stop kicking me.”
“But kicking is how we say thank you in Spanish.”
See? Even something is off with my three-year-old daughter.
A few weeks ago, Harlan said “These are too sour, they make my eyes shake!” I looked at him just to make sure they weren’t shaking because I forgot and gave him Skittles with red food coloring again. They weren’t.
That same night I had a dream that I was in a crowd and people were pelting me with baseballs. Coincidentally, the next morning I walked out to my car and my neighbor across the street yelled “heads up” and threw a baseball at me.
And all the things happening are not negative. We decided to sell our house and move back to North Carolina. Days later we had two full price offers without ever listing it. The fact that we are leaving Austin due to my wife’s health could have been a disaster in many ways. But something’s in the air. It’s all working out splendidly. Obviously something’s gone out of retrograde. So onward we go into the vibes.
I just looked up when I wrote that, by the way.
“There’s a big…machine in the sky…some kind of electric snake…coming straight at us.”
“Shoot it,” said my attorney.
“Not yet,” I said. “I want to study its habits.”
— from Hunter S. Thompson’s “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas”
“Harlan, are you friends with the monster?”
— Cerys Weylyn Davis
I love this exchange. It makes me think of my decision last year to do a stint as a stay-at-home parent. Stay-at-home parenting was coming straight at me. I battled it. I studied its habits. But I didn’t shoot it. I befriended the monster. And now that I’ve been doing it for seven months, I’m planning my return back to lawyerland. After moving to Austin in November, we are moving back to North Carolina this summer. That’s right, the real North Carolina comeback is about to happen. My taste buds just got accustomed to brisket and jalapeños now that they’re going back to chopped pork and hush puppies.
Here’s how my brain is dealing with it: yesterday I waited through the Starbucks drive-through for a good twenty minutes only to realize I was at the Wendy’s. I made a hiccuppy chicken noise not unlike a “bok” when I saw pictures of burgers on the board and sped off. To put it mildly, I’m slightly confused. Still.
Last night I sat under the live oaks in the backyard and watched a storm way off lighting up the sky with near-constant lightning. I thought about this Texas landscape. All these live oaks, cedars, Texas palms, and prickly pear cacti in the hills. It is truly where south meets southwest. I’m going to miss this climate. Shorts through the winter is a concept I can appreciate even with my chicken-like British-skinned legs. And the rivers here. Man, the rivers here are spring-fed and clear, loaded with bass and gargantuan gar that are there for the catching twelve months a year.
But I’m looking forward to being back in Raleigh. There’s the Haw River not far away, the snakiest river I’ve ever fished. The piedmont pines have a way of simultaneously humbling and rekindling a person. And the swamps of eastern North Carolina rival Louisiana. There’s one called the Devil’s Gut at Jamestown where there’s a put-in that is lorded over by a cricket lady. There’s a river called the Cashie and I still can’t figure out how to pronounce it. Cash-eeeee? Cuh-shy? Cuh-sheeee? When the locals say it, it’s as if I just got dropped off a spaceship. All these rivers flow out to these sounds that look endless but do in fact end at the slivers that are the Outer Banks.
At any rate, I was just working on my resume. And I realize that most of the accomplishments I’ve had over the last six months as a stay at home dad are never going to show up on my resume. I would list the following as major victories:
*Transferred two sleeping kids at once from car seats to bed with two semi-somnolent urinations on the way, neither of them mine. The urinations, that is, the kids are both mine.
*Put shoes on a fairy.
*Cleaned up bowel-soiled leggings while doing an online CLE entitled “The Mobile Lawyer.”
*Made mac and cheese without opening my eyes.
*Gave a haircut with a pocket knife.
*Outran my daughter on all fours with severe back spasms at a Louisiana rest stop.
*Urinated in public at a Memphis gas station without getting arrested.
*Inadvertently taught my son to do the same.
I know there are more. These are just the ones that occur to me right now. As I think about returning to the work world of being a lawyer, I feel that once again the giant electric snake in the sky is coming straight at me. One thing I’ve learned though, if I’ve learned nothing else as a stay-at-home dad, is that it will all come naturally if I let it — if I just open my mind to the natural path.
As one of my clients once wisely said, “The good Lord never made a menthol tobacco plant no how.” I think what he was trying to say is be natural.
jbrettdavis 