Endless Vacation

Just outside of Florence, Oregon is an area of upper end homes dotting the shore line of Woahink Lake, a little freshwater lake just large enough to have, at one time at least, surface enough to allow small seaplanes to take off and land there. I know the area because, when I was a small child I did the summer vacations there at my grandparents little mobile home. Back then there weren't any upscale developments. The grandparents lived in what we would today call an RV resort. That's what it is, by the way. I got to thinking about that time and place last weekend when I took the wife and our 21 year old son to the southern Oregon coast for an over niter. We loaded up the pick up just the way my dad had done when I was a kid, with my boy and the dog riding in back in the canopied bed with blankets and pillows. Had the ice chest  with drinks and goodies, and off we went, dog whining incessantly about all the unusual change and activity.

It's been four years since we were able to get away. I was either working and catching up on bills or not working and collecting them. These days, I don't care about the bills. They are trivial and irrelevant now. I've always had to drive slow when she was in the car with me. She gets nervous with my love of leaning into turns. This time I drove slow just to keep the pain from her. The cervical cancer hurts all around the place where she sits. She has stents in the ureters between the kidneys and bladder. Leaning into turns isn't her thing, anymore. So slow and comfortable, we meandered through the winding canyon road of US 199, from the heated interior valleys to the cool and misty southern Oregon coast. She texted her friend Steph when we had cell service. We ate jerky from Taylor's in Cave Junction. We let cars pass. We held hands, but we don't talk about the future anymore, the way we used to. That was the part that was driving me crazy. It's coming to me even as I write this, we weren't daydreaming about the future. We did that every time we went out, before the cancer. She would see a farm or a house and say, "Oh! That's so cute! I couldn't live there, though." Or, "I want to live there! What kind of work does this place have?" "Look at that house! THEY HAVE COWS!!" It was our gentle game. A process of affirming our complimentary tastes and values, and celebrating our differences. Of passing the time together. We did say hi to the cows we passed along the way. It's an imperative, isn't it? And we fed the seagulls. The mob of seagulls. But we didn't make idle plans for the future this time.

And I remember laying on my stomach at 7 years of age, on the dock across from the auto-park where my grandparents lived with the Marlboros and filled dishes of hard candy and porcelain figurines  art deco paintings. I remember the gray-blue light of dawn creeping over the glass-flat surface of the lake. Occasional calls from the Spotted Towee flitting through the Sal-Lal and the hiss of fine mist settling on the surface of the water, the whine of distant tires of a commercial truck on wet pavement, the smells of sea and Sitka Spruce and brackish freshwater. And I would lay there with my fishing pole and tackle box and styro-foam dish of African Night Crawlers in wet, balled newspaper, and stare through the eight inch hole cut through the deck of the dock, into the waters below. I watched the trout through that window, hovering, swimming in place, and dancing a slow motion dance. And time ground to a halt, there. The moment stole the wind from time, and her sails went slack. The dance in the world hidden by the glare on the surface of the lake took precedence and for a few moments, the world waited.

It was such a moment that I searched for this weekend. A moment without cancer. An open ended moment without time. A place with no deadline, no schedule of events or appointments. It was elusive but I think we found it near the end of the trip. When we had resigned that the pain was increasing and it was time to head home before things got much worse. We had searched for a place to feed the gulls. It had to be "perfect", in a sense, because it was her impression that some people would rather you did not feed the gulls. They wouldn't want the noise or the mess. We finally arrived upon a set of commercial docks. No one was around but gulls occupied the tops of pier pilings and rooftops of the buildings. There must have been fifty gulls mobbed around the truck after she threw out the first piece of bread.

She was smiling. She watched them fly and hover near the truck, trying to pluck bread from her hand. She watched for cars and other people, hoping to avoid their disapproval. And for a few moments, just a few, I saw joy in her eyes. There was no cancer, no pain, no schedule, and no ending.