ASSAY: A JOURNAL OF NONFICTION STUDIES
6.1
6.1
Once a summer, when I was a boy in New York, my family would cram snarling into the Rambler station wagon and sail north into the teeming wilderness of Connecticut or Vermont for a week on a lake, during which we would be punctured by vast insects, catch fish the size of subway tokens, and inhabit sagging moist cottages and cabins so dense with that unmistakable dusty weary woody moldy summer-cabin scent that it entered our skin and bones and innermost cellular souls, so that when I smell it here and there even now I am instantly again twelve years old, gingerly entering an icy pool covered with rotting leaves and spawning frogs, or staring up from the bottom bunk at the epic equatorial sag of the ancient mattress above me, or ducking an insect the size of a pterodactyl at dusk, and feeling its fangs graze my bristling crewcut, and realizing that at some point we were going to have to offer up one of our younger brothers as bait, if we were going to get through the week with most of our blood intact.
Over the Throgs Neck Bridge we would go, making jokes about throgs and tadpoles, and then for a few moments we would be in Upstate New York, which was everything north of Central Park all the way to Canada, and then we would enter Connecticut or Vermont, which to us were regions of impenetrable wilderness, rife with moose and snowshoes and bereft of bagels and bialys, though there were restaurants here and there serving things like snake jerky and raccoon pie. Only once that I remember from any of those summers did we eat in a local restaurant, where we had roast marmot as the proprietors talked about hockey and gunplay, and one brother found elk kidneys in his water glass, or so he said. The amusing part about our family vacationing at a lake was that not one of us liked to swim or fish or putter about in boats; most of our waterplay was shoving each other off the rickety dock into the icy and terrifying water, or skimming rocks at each other across inlets and bays, or wading in exactly waist-deep in order to add a drop of salt to the overall volume. Our mom and dad never got closer to the water than the cabin porches, and there were years, as I recall, that our dad never got even that far, not being much for being pierced by the probiscii of untrammeled and ferocious creatures, as he said, adding cheerfully that science tells us the mosquito that just jabbed its rapier into you probably recently dipped its foul and germ-ridden snout into mangy deer, unidentifiable roadkill, Lutherans, and turtles dying of consumption, not to scare you or anything. I remember my brother Tommy catching a fish the size of a dime, and the rest of us brothers diligently trying to clean the fish, as we knew we were supposed to do in order to eat it, and the result of our efforts was the aforementioned night at a local restaurant, where weasel schnitzel was the day’s special, and shapely lumps of last year’s snow was the only dessert. I also remember the one time we went horseback-riding, which led to our sister, in her new jeans, losing a lot of flesh from her thighs, and our youngest brother sneezing so volcanically that we thought he lost an eyeball. I also remember the look on our dad’s face when the stableman asked if he, our dad, would like to climb aboard a horse and canter. Even now, after thirty years as a writer, three decades of trying to find the right parade of words for a particular image or moment, I cannot come anywhere near an accurate sense of our father’s face, although I do remember the instant effect of the word canter on his eyebrow, and I remember us children laughing so hard that one of us peed a little in his new jeans our mother had bought us for summer vacation; you hate to name names, but that was Tommy. I also remember that the horse our father declined to board was named something like Satan’s Spawn, but that might not be exactly right. After a week of this sort of thing, having showered only once each because of the ravenous spiders bigger than dogs in the shower stalls, we would pack up the Rambler again, having added such ephemera as boxes of maple sugar candy and skunk pelts to the load, and we would drive home again though the endless forests, dreaming of bagels. Without fail our mother, turning around to count children to be sure we had not yet again left Tommy at a rest stop, would miscount and make our dad stop the car, but often this happened right near a Howard Johnson’s Restaurant, and occasionally we could convince our dad to spring for the all-you-could-eat chicken special. One time, I believe in Connecticut, our brother Kevin ate so much chicken at the all-you-can-eat chicken special that Howard Johnson’s went out of business forthwith, said our dad, which is a rare case of the word forthwith being used in the right way at the right time. |
Brian Doyle was a dad, a dad, a dad, a husband, a son, a brother, a friend, a basketball nut, and a citizen, who edited the University of Portland's alumni magazine for a quarter century and wrote twenty-eight books of essays, novels, stories, proems, and prayers. His essays, which often appeared in Orion, Harper's, The American Scholar, The Atlantic, and many other journals, were reprinted in the Best American Essays seven times, as well as the Best American Spiritual Writing, the Best American Science and Nature Writing, and other anthologies. He was awarded the Oregon Book Award, the John Burroughs Medal, a literature award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and several other prizes. His twenty-ninth book, of new and selected essays, One Long River of Song, will be published in December 2019. Brian died of brain cancer in May 2017.
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