From the beginning, my parents were asylum-seekers. Every spare moment was consumed by wandering near and far to find that home away from home. On weekends, they drove the country roads surrounding Omaha, looking for a farmhouse where they could escape city life. Vacations were faraway ventures in search of the perfect sanctuary.
After years of exploration, they chanced upon Hidden Paradise. Nestled in a deep valley in the sand hills of Nebraska, it was a mere six-hour drive from home. I was seven the summer of that discovery; but it took a full four more years before Mama and Daddy realized the dream of owning their own summer home.
For Mama, my brother and sister and me, our trips to Hidden Paradise became a sort of migration. Like the predictable layovers of the sandhill cranes in the Nebraska cornfields every year, on the Friday before Memorial Day weekend, we packed into the car so Daddy could take us to our cabin. We didn’t return to the city until Labor Day, just in time for school to begin.
The first summer we rented a rustic cabin called Resta Vista. Mama worked on an editorial job that paid for the trailer that became our summer home for the next six years. I consider that summer the first year of our migrations because it was the first year that Daddy left us.
Daddy began his own migratory pattern, leaving on Sunday evenings after dinner and returning the following late Friday night. Watching him leave that first Sunday was hard. His brown Oldsmobile Eighty-eight spit sand behind him as he climbed out of the valley. I envisioned him flying down the highway, crossing the Platte River nine times before returning to Omaha. I imagined him lonely back home without all of us to keep him company.
Mama and Daddy seemed unaware of the phenomenon of the friction of distance, where interaction between people decreases with the increase in geographical distance. Because Daddy was gone more than he was with us, distance won out. Even on his weekends with us, he arose before the rest of the family and disappeared up the creek with his tackle and fly rod. Occasionally, I would see him, knee-deep in water, his focus aimed at his next big catch. It seemed more like a memory than a sighting.
It took me back to the days when I was Daddy’s fishing buddy. He would wake me early on a Saturday morning, and we would drive from Omaha to a nearby lake, just the two of us.
I thought about watching Daddy, how quickly he’d bait a hook. Within seconds of putting down his tackle box, he was casting out. He did it with the grace of a ballerina. In his left hand, he pulled out slack on his line and with his right gently whip-whipped the end of his pole in the air two times. On the third, he released his thumb – whir-r-r-r – at just the right moment to drop his hook far from shore. I longed to be able to cast a line like he did.
I tried. Instead of Daddy’s straight taut line, mine hung down in loops, like jellyfish tentacles while my right hand waved the pole in the air in short jerky motions like I was swatting flies. Releasing my thumb, my line dropped, a thud in the shallow water. I pulled the pole back, straight up in the air, then dived and ducked as the hook swung back towards my head while the line wound itself around my fishing pole. I carefully held the line between two fingers just above the hook and twirled the pole freeing it. I struggled to rewind the reel. This time, tall grasses along the shore swallowed my line. Daddy rushed to my rescue, then turned around and placed my hook ever so perfectly. I left it there and sat quietly on the bank, waiting to feel the first jiggle on my line.
As far apart as we sat on that lake’s bank, I never felt the distance the way that I did those summers at Hidden Paradise. Much of the time, it was as if he weren’t even there. When he was, and if he wasn’t miles up the creek from our trailer, there was a friction between Mama and him. Usually, their trouble roiled just below the surface, and if you weren’t paying attention, you’d miss the meaning of the encounter.
***
Daddy had his eye on this big fish across the creek from our trailer. It lay in front of this large rock, a boulder really, just under the surface of the water. Daddy would watch the fish swim upstream, to position itself in front of the rock. Motionless, it would watch Daddy.
He said that the fish probably thought it was invisible, being somewhat camouflaged by the rock. Its brown color blended into the rock so much that sometimes the only giveaway to its presence was the shimmer of pink that ran down its side.
From head to tail it appeared to be nearly as long as the submerged boulder was wide, but water had a way of magnifying things, so it was hard to tell. In Daddy’s eyes, it was the prize catch, and that’s all that mattered.
Every spring on our trip up to the trailer, Daddy would stop at the bait and tackle shop to buy his summer supplies. This usually consisted of an assortment of lures, twenty-pound leaders and round split shot sinkers. He also bought his supply of earthworms for the season.
During the week, when Daddy went back to town to work, I was left the keeper of the worms. We kept them in a coffee can under the back end of the trailer. Every morning, after Mama finished her coffee, she would give me her grounds. I would empty them into the coffee can where the earthworms lived and stir it into their soil.
Although Daddy insisted on the best equipment, he wasn’t one of those people who decked himself out in hip-waders and pretended to be a fisherman. Daddy had his own style. He wore nondescript, beige swimming trunks and a short-sleeved button-up khaki shirt. Even his old, waterlogged, suede Hush Puppies were beige. Only his boonie hat, old and faded, decorated with handmade flies and his favorite fishhooks, was orange. Wearing this getup, he’d stand in the creek, his legs temporarily disrupting the water’s flow until it went past him, coming together in front of him, becoming one wide stream again.
He disappeared at dawn, and we kids would see him sometimes, far upstream from our trailer. We were more likely to see him if we’d start our journey at Seven Springs, a mile trek on foot, up the hard-packed dirt road, carrying inner tubes for the ride downstream. We’d get into the creek, loud, screaming, playing children. But the sight of Daddy, knee-deep in water, fishing rod in hand as we’d round a bend would hush our frolicking until we were well past his spot.
He had been trying to catch the fish for three years. Every year, when we returned to our trailer, that big old mocking rainbow trout would be there, waiting to lure Daddy in.
He had the professional equipment to get the job done. He had all of the latest lures and tackle and, of course, his own hand-tied flies. They were called streamers and ghosts and buggers and muddlers. They were yellow and orange and iridescent silvers and blues. I wondered how this dummy bait could dupe a fish. An earthworm, wiggling in the water current, or a grasshopper, kicking its legs like a swimmer seemed a bit more tantalizing.
Apparently, Daddy’s prize catch thought so, too, for after three years and hundreds of hours of trying, Daddy had not been able to catch that big rainbow trout. Mama argued with him that he should go back to the basics, but Daddy pooh-poohed her recommendations. She wasn’t a fisherman after all.
One Friday afternoon, she was sitting in the folding lawn chair, wearing her swimming suit as she did every afternoon. Bored of watching the flicker family that nested in the bough of the tree across the creek, and having run out of reading material, she decided to try her luck.
Mama had a brilliant mind. She was able to read the classics, even French and Spanish, Hugo and Ibanez; but she couldn’t open a door with a key that fit the lock. She just wasn’t mechanical. So the thought of her trying to figure out Daddy’s fly rod was out of the question. Instead, we children sat and watched as she pulled out a cane pole, equipped with a simple bobber and hook. She asked me to fetch a worm. Then she plodded across the narrow footbridge to the other side of the creek.
Standing on the bank, just upstream from the boulder, Mama dropped her line into the creek. Hidden by the earthworm that I’d weaved onto the hook the way that Daddy had taught me, the hook sunk into the creek’s current and swam past that stubborn trout. Did it not see Mama standing on the bank behind it, or had it laughed at her audacity, watching her as she walked across the bridge, wearing her faded blue swimming suit and carrying her cane pole, thinking that she could get lucky using such primitive equipment?
The fish darted out to tease the worm, barely brushing its dorsal exterior. Mama saw the bobber dip below the surface of the water, and she heaved the cane pole into the air over her head. The surprised fish was pulled from its creek and flung onto the bank where it flopped at Mama’s sandal-clad feet.
Rather than remove the hook from the corner of the trout’s mouth and clean and gut it, she cut her line to remove the fish from her pole, filled the kitchen sink with water, and saved it for Daddy’s arrival around dinnertime.
Mama couldn’t hurt a fly. Growing up, she always scooped up the spiders we found in the house onto a matchbook cover and took them outside. Neighbor kids brought her wounded birds to heal, and she took in a litter of opossums after a mob had killed the mother who had become stuck under the floorboards of a cabin.
She couldn’t bring herself to kill this fish. If Daddy would gut it, she would eat it, but the whole endeavor was more of a statement about how just because her way of doing things was different didn’t make it wrong.
When Daddy walked in, Mama took him into our trailer’s small kitchen. There in the sink was the beautiful, bewildered rainbow trout. Too long to lie in a straight line across the sink diagonally, it lay, still as could be, waiting for Daddy’s gutting knife. Daddy reached in, grabbing the fish by its gills and carefully removed the hook. Then he put his stringer through the mouth and looped it through the fish’s gill and carried it over the footbridge to the other side of the creek, where he dropped the fish back in beside its rock.
Perhaps Daddy thought, that’s my fish, by God, as he dropped that fish back in the water, for he didn’t give up on catching it his way. He’d sit across from that fish and stare it down watching for patterns. “See how he’s always here around dinner time,” Daddy asked one night as he bent over to light the makeshift grill that he’d made out of red bricks and refrigerator shelves on the sand.
I laid my book across my lap as Daddy drew me into his surveillance of the fish. Before I knew it, Daddy’s coals burnt gray-white, while he stood upstream from that fish with his fly rod, trying to tempt that hungry fish with a handmade lure.
The water rushed around and through Daddy’s legs, and I noticed that even though the current was swift, the water climbing the back of Daddy’s thighs before rushing past him, his line was not as taut as I thought it should be. Instead it lay curled on the surface of the water, like spaghetti noodles in a pot of roiling water. I thought then that Daddy had lost his grip, and not just on that fish.
***
One day, my little sister Anna and I stepped into the creek in front of the cabin called the White House. It was named for its color and for being one of the handful of two-story cabins in the park, and being such it looked more like a house than a cabin. It was the cabin we stayed in that second summer while our trailer was being brought in and leveled on our lot, the lot that Mama called our sandy beach.
We entered the creek at the White House because it was downstream from the rapids, where big boulders and a curve in the creek created an amusement park-like ride for those brave enough to tube through it. Though just yards from that treacherous corner, the creek was calm at the landing as we stepped into the water.
It was cold; but Anna and I didn’t mind it after the long trek up the main park road from our trailer to the White House. The hard-packed dirt road, surrounded by white cliffs of hardened sand reflected the sun down on us, toasting us golden. It was mid-summer, and even my pale skin had quit burning.
In the calm waters of the landing, Anna and I balanced ourselves on our inner tubes. I held on to hers and with my heels dug into the sandy bottom of the creek, I shoved away from the bank, and we rocked and swayed towards the first bend in the stream.
With my left hand holding her inner tube, I used my right arm to steer us away from the side of the creek. The curve coming up quickly required skilled navigation in order to avoid the jutting rocks and the trees that bowed over the water. I held Anna’s tube away from the sides of the creek bed. I pulled in my feet and let my tube rebound off the side of one of the rocks. The torque sent us whirling like ballroom dancers until the calmer water seized us and rocked us in its motherly arms.
I let go of Anna’s tube, and the water carried us downstream past empty cabins and under footbridges. Our feet dangled, making rivulets in the cold water. I laid my head back and looked up at the trees that hung over the creek. A stained glass slideshow swam past my eyes created from the backlighting of the sun through the tiny elm leaves.
Anna started singing, row, row, row your boat. I sat up straight in my inner tube and waited for my turn. Once she had finished her first round, I let her start the next; then I joined in halfway through. When we passed Devil’s Slide, we still sang loudly as we floated under the last bridge, just before the last curve.
When we emerged from under the bridge, our happy voices mixed with those of Mama and Daddy who stood on our sandy beach; but their voices weren’t happy.
“How could you have done that?” Mama yelled at Daddy.
Our singing stopped, and I tried to listen to the commotion from our sandy beach. I almost missed grabbing Anna’s inner tube as we approached the turn in the creek where trees stood at attention on the steep bank across from our trailer. Our sudden splashing and steering drowned out the sound of Mama and Daddy’s voices. We aimed for our landing and dragged our butts across the sand to stop.
Anna was out of the water first. She stood like a statue at the water’s
edge, holding her inner tube around her waist like a ballet tutu.
While she stood, unsure whether to step onto the sand, I swept past
her and headed straight back up the road towards the White House,
stealing only a momentary look back towards Mama and Daddy who stood
stony and silent on the sand.
Anna caught up to me and asked, “Do you think Mama and Daddy are
going to get a divorce?” I didn’t know how to answer her, so I didn’t.
***
Going back home to Omaha did not close the gap. Now the breach could be measured by the distance between them, whether it was Mama in Hidden Paradise and Daddy in Omaha, Mama sitting in the kitchen after dinner and Daddy falling asleep in his recliner in the living room, or the short five feet from the head of the dining room table to the end of it. The void was permanent.
From the time Mama and Daddy took their first step in searching for the perfect sanctuary until they finally found their Hidden Paradise, so much time had passed that the change in each of them was inevitable. Perhaps they began their search with like goals, to find peace and solitude, but found their solitude was not a point of convergence. And like the span of time they took to find just the right sanctuary, the space between them was created gradually. It was an accumulation of distance over time.
When Mama and Daddy found their summer paradise, they may have thought that it would strengthen their marriage, that their separations would deepen their feelings for each other. Instead, the gap between Daddy and Mama opened like a chasm. She drifted away from him, and he couldn’t get a handhold. And somehow, without even realizing it, Mama was taking me with her. It was as easy as plopping my butt down into the center of an inner tube and letting the water carry me down the creek, like the rocks that tumbled under it along the sand. Perhaps Mama was one of those rough rocks that had been stuck in the sandy bottom until the passing of water and time had dislodged her. Now, she reeled forward, looking for change – looking for something better.
Copyright 2009. Erin C. Arellano. All rights reserved.