Reflections On Water (Vol. 4, No. 1) - Prose

Next morning, tear down, re-pack, drive on through rain, redistribute paper and art supplies and treats, mediate squabbles, answer the ten-thousand questions, locate camp, repeat. And then we were in Vancouver. By plane to Seattle. Then to the hot-house humidity of Detroit. Then Pennsylvania, my childhood home. Suitcases in hand, we straggled down the ramp to meet my brother John and my ailing father for a brief preliminary visit before zooming off in a rental car out to the New Jersey seashore for four days of nostalgic re-visiting of my own boyhood, vicariously through my sons.

We never did really relax. Not on the beach where the undertow tugged ominously at small bodies. Not under the scorching sun. Not in the quaint, sedate rooming house. My new wife, Darlene, and I shared an ambivalent blend of vigilance and clandestine stolen moments, brief interludes when the boy-machines were off-duty. And so it went for 14 days.

It was the final drive home when reality came unglued. The road seemed longer the farther we drove, as if we were driving on silly putty. Either the boys got larger or the back seat shrunk. We were following an enormous, old-fashioned cement-mixer for what seemed like a Mexican Monday. Both of us were tired, but it was me who noticed first the gradual resemblance of the truck to an elephant. It was wet, muddy, and sandy, swaying awkwardly from side to side, its mixer turning slowly, steadily, heavily.

The shrill, monotonous cacophony of backseat voices, questions, squabble, babble blended with the elephant. Road signs which pretended to designate miles which still lay ahead made increasingly less sense. How could we have covered only 27 km in 70 minutes? Dar clenched the wheel, determined to diminish the immutable miles, but the elephant held sway. We were under its spell.

The back-seat boys drew pictures furiously, snipped nose-holes through them, donned colorful masks; they cut eye-holes and made cameras with which they snapped our pictures. They tore them into sections and delivered them to each other from foreign countries; they scissored each other’s photos into confetti, and the back seat slowly filled with paper until only their noses and squeals were visibly audible as the mounds of confetti deepened. As we inched towards the receding point of home, the confetti spilled indescribably softly into the front seat.

At first, it was soft as air and imperceptible. At a bend in the road, I suddenly realized I could no longer see Darlene, only her hands clenching the wheel. When she opened her window, the confetti swept out like a flock of butterflies, covering fields and highway for miles. We were so caught up in the sudden miracle that we failed to notice the silent arrival of a motorcycle escort of police and a procession of nuns. What was this? The car radio playing the Hallelujah chorus in an ancient octave?

Apparently, the police had radioed ahead, for we had begun to pass crews of carpenters erecting Butterfly Shrines; banners announced the Miracle of the Butterflies. In a tiny town we whizzed through (for suddenly our car was traveling, hurtling at tremendous speed), The True Confetti Story was playing at the cinema. Crowds and parades announcing our arrival became as commonplace as cornfields, and we easily acquired the jaded tiredness of celebrities traveling incognito. We barely batted an eye at the splendiferous celebrations prepared for us in the larger towns. Actually, we had begun to scowl (like Bob Dylan or those other oldest angels who had long grown tired of adulation).

I donned a wig and cyrano-nose to avoid being recognized. Darlene produced a set of black leather horse-blinders, which forced her to stare straight ahead even on hair-pin turns, so we were often well off the road, driving through cornfields and long-forgotten landscapes, where people from the middle ages (some still trudging in rusted armor and spurring their yoked oxen through chest-deep mud) paused to marvel at us being borne aloft on a cushion of confettiesque artwork.

We came, finally, to rest in our own familiar driveway. It seemed small as a thimble, yet, at the same time, large as Valhalla, the Viking heaven. The boys seemed not to have noticed anything unusual. Their silver-foil helmets were firmly in place as they leapt from the car and went immediately to work, scissoring the leaves of the bushes, creating a menagerie reminiscent of the sculpting of Edward Scissorhands.

Slowly, as a man in someone else’s dream, I effortlessly lifted the tremendously heavy travel rack of soaking tents, bags, and axes, hotdogs and hockey sticks, boots, knives, lanterns, driftwood cutlasses - a conglomeration of indeterminate paraphernalia that had magnetized itself to the electric-blue tarp (perhaps much was manifested from our contact with the miracle shrines) - hefted it onto my ordinary shoulders, and carried it through the garden towards the oversized shed. Partway through the strawberry patch I collapsed. The host of objects magically slid, like dragon teeth, into the rich soil and instantly began to sprout into a life-sized figure of Luther, my father, precisely in the center of the garden. He was made of paper.