The mist hung dead over the lake, a settled shroud our canoe parted and wove through. The cloud, about a knee deep as far as I could see, absorbed all noise except the far-off interstate whine and the occasional swish of a fresh water bass churning the water. My paddle dipped the surface, I splashed too much, and my father shushed me. The air was crisp and slightly damp. The far side of Silver Lake was ringed with a dense wall of long-leaf pine and oak; behind us the campground with our warm truck camper parked a hundred feet or so up the bank. There my mother and younger brother slept on thin vinyl mattresses.
My father commandeered the stern; I got the easy task of paddling when he ordered me in gruff blurts to help turn the craft. We weren't fishing, but we were quiet enough we could have been. When his aggravation percolated and he got angry when he knew it shouldn't, the calm was interrupted with a jagged directive. Turn, dammit, or, No, I said the other side. My father was a big man, much bigger than he had ever imagined himself to become, with tan, muscular arms disguised by flab. Before a couple heart attacks knocked him out of business, he was a plasterer and a bricklayer. These days he was too creative and industrious to sit still, and collected disability checks and moved us from place to place out of boredom, mostly. This time we were on vacation for a couple weeks from a house—a more permanent one this time—we were fumigating for roaches. We left it shut and dark and filled with poisonous gas. The previous owner had kept thousands of chirpy tropical birds in cages lining the garage, an avian warehouse, and the multitudes of roaches they had attracted stuck around long after the birds were shipped out. The bugs made the place unlivable. No one in that area could have as many roaches, I was convinced. I didn't have the sense to keep something like that to myself, so I would tell my friends, thinking that our wars against the roach kingdom would impress them, and they would tell their parents. The indignity of it drove my father mad. He was determined to rid us of the problem. When we were about to leave and had set off the insecticide bombs, he realized he forgot his wallet. He ducked into the cloud with a handkerchief over his face.
We traveled north on Saturday morning, towing a small camper trailer behind our big Ford sedan, into North Florida once again, and had stopped at this campground for a few nights. Silver Lake, with its crude sand roads, palmetto bushes and moss-draped oaks, was more quiet and rustic than the overnight, neon-washed campgrounds we had stayed at along the highway, the places that always had Good Sam stickers on the office door so you know it was acceptable for kids and fastidious parents.
My father lost his patience over many things, and when we got into the middle of the lake with the canoe at 6:30 a.m., I felt his frustration creep from the stern as my steering, the best an 11-year-old boy could muster, was not moving us forward. When he started complaining that I couldn't manage anything and threatened to turn the damn canoe back to the shore, I straightened up, dug my paddle in the black pool and sullenly worked with my father's rudder job. He was a big man, and there wasn't much I could influence. I would have preferred to just soak in the rippling lake, the mist crawling around us, and the slightly menacing far shore.
"See those ducks?" he said, wheezing a bit. "Let's take the canoe over there."
"Where?" I squinted, scanning the shoreline for blobs that behave like ducks. The brown mottled birds fluttered around a clump of tall marsh grass. There. I dug in again. Our paddles churned the smooth water rhythmically; we occasionally got into synch, but mostly we were at odds. The bow weaved and jerked. Those few moments when when we clicked, when the canoe surged confidently forward, these moments we were happiest, and that joy pushed us further. But our timing must have been off, and the bow shuddered when I lost my bearing on the wood for a second. My father groaned. He would complain, then catch himself, soften his instructions, and reassure me. We made progress. A hundred yards or so from the middle of the lake, where we had been tooling quietly, we cruised into more shallow, mucky water covered with dying brown algae and spiked with tall marsh grass that had been crushed by trolling sport fishing boats. Oak branches hung low over the water, and moss screened the bank's edge, which was crowded with all sorts of underbrush and vast spiderwebs. A little animal—a squirrel, a raccoon, an armadillo...a bobcat?—scratched through a stand of palmetto bushes. The fronds waved him off.
"Didja hear that?" I asked my father.
"Yeah, it was probably a raccoon," he said, but I knew he didn't know what it was. He rarely hiked through the woods, and he never told me about any experiences with animals more wild than guard dogs. When I finally saw a bobcat in the woods a few years later—after he died—I felt like I had earned something, or improved upon something he gave me. The big cat I had seen in an abandoned junkyard had rushed off like any old house cat.
Why did we come to this side of the lake? Because it was further away from the campsite than the middle? From here, our car was a light blue dint, our trailer a white blob. Maybe he had perspective here, could see all that was our life over there, with half the family sleeping. Maybe from here he could admit he didn't know where we going but that something good ought to come out of getting there. The car, the camping trailer (the third in as many summers), they where a way to somewhere, right? Up and down the Eastern Seaboard, through the Blue Ridge and Smoky Mountains, along parkways and the interstates, we stopped at every kind of campground and state park, and they all broke down to the same experience: This is where we are, let's eat, let's take a walk through the woods, let's light the propane lamp and figure out where we'll drive tomorrow. Sleep, then breakfast at the creaky hour of 6 a.m. From the parched obliterating drone of the highway we could gradually forget about where we were before now and think about where we would be in a few hours. I wasn't even a teenager yet and already I was experiencing the displacement reserved for adults, torn between a dim nostalgia for a place I had visited but didn't get to know, and anticipating like a fool a mildly distant destination where the fun was about to begin. I guess I hadn't developed the cynicism to know it would be exactly like the place I was before, and that place was as good a place as any to plant ourselves. So my brother and I would just sit in the back seat, inventing stories and situations and playing word games until they bored us.
My father might have thought the flash of cars and trailers interspersing the scrubby oaks and palmettos along the far side of the lake was like any crummy landscape painting you might see in a motor lodge, but I know he was seeing the simple beauty in that scene, knowing that nothing was perfect, ever, and in that scene where a used car lot meets a tough stretch of lakeside forest lay all sorts of possibilities—a honeymooning couple sleeping in each other's arms, or a lonely old man sacked out in the back of his pickup truck with his tools, or high school kids sleeping black sleep from too much cheap beer the night before. But he would probably think those things only if the kids didn't make too much noise, or if he talked to the old man while he and my mother walked around the campground before dinner, or if he saw the couple through their tent screen, watching a television that was plugged into one of the electrical hookups. Otherwise, he wouldn't bother.
The light was growing harsher, and the mist dispersing, as the traffic on the far-off interstate grew steadily louder. The sun shone grievously. I saw a man jerk his arm up on the far side of the lake, and a second later the engine of his motor boat whined. My father and I silently watched our morning dissipate to noise and sun. He knew he didn't want to be in the middle of the lake, sweating and paddling to make up for my lack of direction and strength. He had to be back, or beyond. Just not someplace hanging between.
"Whaddaya say we get back to the campsite, then we can figure out which way we'll take," he said, leaning back. "And we'll figure out where we might be by nightfall?"
"Sounds good, Dad," I said, and as he propelled his large body and the sinking end of the canoe with a couple furious paddle strokes, I told myself I would try to keep in stride.
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