Moorings

I cannot rush the departure. Things have to be done, and they have to be done in a certain order. I stack the dirty plates and then the bowls on top of them and put them in the pan in which I’ve been cooking for the past 4 days. I take them to the edge of the dock and kneel down, my phone next to me. I scoop lake water into the plastic tub.

The fish arrive from the depths and circle the mooring ropes beneath the dock. These ropes keep the floating cabin in place, attached to cement blocks at the bottom, 70 feet down. The morning sun intensifies, heat on my shaking shoulders.

The phone lights up and I answer on the first ring and ask the question before my daughter speaks: “Did any of the mobile vets answer?”

“None of them,” she sobs. “Mom, what am I supposed to do?” I hear in her voice the little girl she once was. But she’s also the adult, the young woman on the verge of 30. I want to protect her from this horrible moment, and I also need to lean on her.

“Keep trying. Try others. Do you want me to try calling too?”

“No,” she says. “Just come home. Come as fast as you can.”

This was our second call of the morning. In the first one, we agreed that Skye, my dog, was in so much pain, she needed to be euthanized.

Meanwhile, I scrape the little bits of food off the pan and into the water with a spatula. The sob doesn’t emerge from my body until the fish open their mouths to receive the small chunks of scrambled egg and quinoa that sink down to them. The food floats down past the mooring ropes that are thick with algae. Any one grief is like that for me, attracting all other sadnesses, little tendrils swaying in the water. And now on top of that: bad mom. Bad dog mom. Bad.

Skye had been a rescue, a senior purebred collie who had been locked in a dark bathroom for years. The resulting neuroses were intense, but once she felt safe, she calmed down and loved us hard, and we loved her back. This morning, she had been alone when she slipped on the floor, couldn’t get up, and my daughter and her boyfriend, who had come to my house to check on her, found her that way, Skye’s shoulder looking like it had been dislocated. Skye screaming in pain.

“I should have been there,” I say out loud to myself and to the fish.

I empty the contents of the enormous Pelican cooler into my smaller travel cooler. I dart to the kitchen to grab the full trash bag and back to the bedroom, where I grab fistfuls of my clothes and throw them into my backpack. Then I turn off the propane, turn off the water pump, put in the blocks for the sliding door to lock it, and exit through the back door, locking it too.

Why did I do it? Why did I leave my dog in the care of my son’s childhood best friend? I was trying to help him, a 26-year-old who was adrift in life, but some part of me knew he’d choose to mostly be home where he lived with his parents, gaming and smoking weed. “Will you stay with her?” I had asked him. I offered him my room, my son’s room or the couch. “Mmm hmmm,” he had said. But I’ll find out later he didn’t spend any nights there; he only came twice a day.

I throw everything into the boat, and I start it, then jump off the boat again to untie it from the cleats. Jump on again, pushing off from the dock. You don’t want to push off and find that the boat won’t start. I learned that the hard way.

I’ve learned so many things the hard way. For instance, buying a floating cabin in your fifties after a divorce from a very long marriage won’t lead you to instant, continuous bliss in nature. You might still be picking up the pieces inside yourself several years afterward, and in nature, you may feel those pieces even more, even if the natural world in this place, on this lake, is spectacular, the Great Smoky Mountains on one side and Nantahala National Forest on the other.

Now that I am on the boat, what I want is speed. I want to be airlifted to my home in Atlanta, to take over for my daughter who should not have to handle this. I want to hug my dog, to ease her pain, to say goodbye to her. I open the throttle, but my old pontoon maxes out at about 10 miles per hour as I head toward the marina. I drive past other floating houses and houseboats—the latter of which are called “factory rigs,” meaning they’re prefab rather than the stick-built structures of the type that I have—and the creek is wide enough to be a lake in itself. The actual lake is 17 miles long, and if you were looking down from a low-flying plane, you’d see small buildings floating in it. You’d see varying sizes of docks or no docks at all, and all the roofs checkered with solar panels. You’d also see an island about the same size, but on closer look you’d see that it’s made of rock. This is the middle of the three camel humps, as they are called because that’s what they look like when the water is low. This time of year, only the largest hump is visible.

The little island, this largest hump of the camel, is adorned with relics: an old blue rowboat with both oars sticking out as if eternally rowing, an American flag on a tall pole, and discrete bunches of red and yellow artificial flowers throughout. This is the unofficial memorial to the lake’s dead, the grandfathers and great grandfathers who had built these floating houses in the sixties. Now their grandchildren owned them. The largest object on this island is a concrete winged white angel that presides over the lake, the living and the dead. I had always felt a tinge of secondhand embarrassment at the earnestness, the sentimentality of that oversized angel in this recreational setting of fishing and water skiing and tube pulling and beer drinking, but now I say a kind of prayer to it as I drive by slowly on the way to the marina: Please end her pain.

At the marina, Joe stands up and walks to the edge of the dock, smiling and ready to receive my boat. I cut the engine when I’m a couple boat lengths away. Joe stops it with both hands, and he ties the ropes to the cleats. When he looks at me, his eyes bright blue under the brim of his Vietnam veteran cap, his smile drops.

“What’s wrong?” he asks. I can barely choke out the words. “My dog . . .” I say. “In Atlanta.” Joe jumps on the boat and grabs my things. On the way up the hill, he tells me that his two Huskies are his heart. We reach my car, parked next to his jeep with a “Hillary for Prison” bumper sticker on the back. I feel the jolt of dissonance between kindness—his actions and his feelings about his own dogs—and the meanness of his bumper sticker. One morning on my way out, I excitedly told the marina owner about the otter that climbed right onto my dock and looked at me with its big brown eyes. “It’s a shame it’s illegal to shoot them,” he said. “They make a huge mess.”

I try to call her, but there are zero bars. I won’t have a signal again until Franklin, another hour. I can’t do anything but drive this narrow dirt river road, be where I am, crying and driving. I’m pulled into shadow and then light again by the oak, maple, and sweetgum trees that canopy the road. The Little Tennessee River whirls and churns beside me in continually changing pockets of inky dark and sparkling light, surging in my own heart like liquid silver, an involuntary joy that clashes with my sorrow. It resonates with the feeling I’d had the day before, which now seems so long ago.

My friend and co-owner had picked me up at the marina. We had planned it so that we’d have a couple hours together before she left. She had been there alone for a few days, and now it was my turn. We sat on the dock together, our feet dangling in the water, a cigarette in her hand. She told me that one of her spiritual teachers taught her to say “you love me” to everything around her. She explained that you can feel love for nature, you can hug a tree, you can love the sky, but when you say “you love me” you can feel it more. You feel enveloped in love.

After she left, I dove into the lake, came up for air and turned over onto my back, taking a deep breath to ease flotation. I felt the serenity. I heard the underwater chug of a boat motor far away. White clouds tiptoed across the blue slate sky.

“You love me,” I said shyly to the sky. “You love me,” I said to the mist rising off the lake, the prospect of the power of this one-way conversation appealing to the most desperate part of me, a part of me I always felt at the lake.

I got out of the water and into my red kayak. I paddled toward the rock cliff behind the floating house, noticing the striations of color in the sedimentary rock that had metamorphosed, slate to schist. I pictured my son, his magnifying loupe in hand, studying these rocks in the same kayak. It made me smile. I nosed the kayak into an opening in the rock, and into the small cave just past my head. Now I was in the dark, ensconced in an ancient silence. It reminded me of being in the fire-hollowed redwood trees in the Santa Cruz mountains, near where I grew up, a feeling of love from the earth, a nearly maternal bond with my surroundings that soothes, that gives me that bone deep sense of connection.

Because that’s it. That’s what I’m really looking for here. It’s not something I can find the words to admit to people. “It’s a beautiful place, so wild, and I love water” is a true statement, and what I typically say about it. But it’s not nearly what I’m looking for. Without fully knowing it, I had expected that my experience here would be like the Mary Oliver poem called “Sleeping in the Forest”: “I thought the earth remembered me, she/ took me back so tenderly, arranging/ her dark skirts, her pockets/ full of lichens and seeds.”

Even with the love of and for my children, my good friends and men who had loved me, I still felt, some layers underneath experiences of satisfaction and joy, untethered, lost, abandoned, and this was from my very beginnings. My overwhelmed single mother who had to leave me home alone for the day when I was 5 years old, sick, and she had to go to work. I spent that day hiding by her bed, dialing 0 on the heavy rotary phone over and over again to hear a woman’s voice say “Operator, may I help you?”

At the lake I feel different things. I have to move and make things happen: Kneel down, get up, haul stuff around, tie and untie ropes, manage the touchy pontoon battery, manage the solar and propane power, handle every single thing that happens. Nothing is comfortable and automated like at home in Atlanta. Here it is so physical, so connected to the weather and the natural world and the things around me. If I’m preoccupied with troubling thoughts or emotions when I’m doing something like getting off or on the boat, I can find myself in the water, phone or car keys floating out of my pocket and down to the bottom, or kayak flipped, wrist banged up. All these things and more have happened. At the lake I must stay aware of being alive, a physical being in a continually changing situation.

And while I am living that way, without the protection of every single convenience of home, layers are coming off. The barrier to those feelings thins and weakens like an inadequate membrane against the depth of the water underneath me, the 70 feet of fish and then bigger fish, their eggs and their bubbles, as well as all the things we’ve dropped in there or the wind has taken from us. And on the surface of the lake, tiny insects make the bass and walleye flip right out of the water to eat them.

So now, with the “you love me” technique from my friend, I’m beginning to tell myself a loving thing to heal all this background pain. I’m not hurting trees and the sky by lying to them about how they feel about me. The sun illuminating the jewels of the Little Tennessee river remind me of it, and I feel a tad bit better.

But still there is this urgency and grief, twining together to make this drive almost unbearable.

When I arrive in Franklin, I pull into a space in the rear of a Taco Bell where I won’t call attention to myself. A car follows me back there, and it parks a few spaces away. I fling open my door, and I weep, bent over the asphalt. What was all this crying? I was not a crier, but now I was crying rivers, lakes. It wanted to keep coming.

I have a signal again, but there are no voice mails or texts. I catch glimpses of the young mother in the black SUV. She has a bumper sticker along the same lines as Joe’s. She has two kids in the back seat, both in car seats. She just sits there, her blonde hair hanging in a long ponytail, taking quick and regular glances at me. After I am spent on that round and throw the sodden tissues onto the passenger seat, I see that she is still there, and she has let the children out of their car seats. A girl about 3 years old, with a blonde ponytail similar to her mom’s, hangs over the back of her mother’s seat, her arms around her mother’s neck. The girl’s cheek is resting against her mother’s cheek, and it looks like she is saying something into her ear.

Cheek on cheek: I am seeing it and also feeling it. It is an odd moment for a visceral memory, but there it is. I remember being 3 years old and riding on my mother’s back in her friend’s swimming pool, my cheek against her cheek, my head against her swim cap, its protruding geranium flowers smelling like hot rubber and chlorine. I was pretending I was a baby whale on the mother whale. It was a slippery grip on her suntan-oiled shoulders. I felt perfectly happy in that moment because we were in the water together and she was all mine.

But my life at the lake is not that. Nothing is that. Nothing can be felt with the intensity of a sensitive child’s heart, especially a neglected child’s heart.

I sit up, close the door and start my car. As I pull out in front of her, the young mother gives me a questioning look and mouths “Are you okay?”

Holy shit, you love me, I think as I mouth back to her: “Yes, I’m OK.”

The realization feels mirthful, bubbly. But she does. I can feel it. It isn’t personal; she doesn’t know me. But she has the big love and compassion that you can pull from cottony clouds and bending trees and can extend to a stranger, that nature can extend to me, that I can extend to myself.

I am not, of course, OK. But I am OK enough to keep driving.

When the tears overwhelm me again, I have to pull into the parking lot at the Rabun County Welcome Center. My phone rings, and I know what’s coming. My daughter tells me that a mobile vet finally responded, had come to the house, had given Skye the injection, and had taken the body.

“Are you okay?” I ask quietly.

“Not at all,” she says. “I don’t think I’ll ever get over watching her scream in pain like that.” We’re silent for a moment while guilt waterfalls over my body, coating my heart, my arms, my legs. Guilt for my carelessness that exposed her to this trauma. Not to mention guilt for Skye herself.

“We’ll have a little memorial for her,” I say.

“Yeah, we’ll talk about her,” she says. “Her dog breath. Her sweetness.”

“Those foxes that chased her home!” I add. We both laugh a little thinking of it, a little lightness. Skye had gotten out one night early in her stay with us, and she was marched home by a little parade of urban foxes. She had looked just like them.

“There’s a lot of water on the floor,” she says, which puzzles me, but I don’t want to ask. “The vet will Venmo request you for the fee.” Before I start the car again, I watch a hawk dive and swoop against the bright blue sky, and a bird fact occurs to me: Birds notice us more than we notice them. I think of the dharma talk I heard Tara Brach, the meditation teacher, give called “Intimacy with Life.” “Someone is here,” is what she suggests we practice saying when we’re in nature. A tree isn’t an it. A tree is someone. A firefly isn’t an it. A firefly is someone. A cloud is someone. An otter. A fish. This bird in the sky.

It’s not a deep puddle where Skye had died. Later, my daughter tells me that she and her boyfriend had figured out that Skye had fallen trying to get to her water. They had spooned water into her mouth to soothe her and it had accumulated under her. It’s not deep, but it’s dark, as if it had been there for years and seeped into the grain of the wood. It has an odd kind of depth.

In the years that followed, I never experienced such deep crying. But there was one time I sobbed in the car. It was a few years later. I was in California for my aunt’s memorial service in Van Nuys. After the service, I headed south to my sister’s house in Orange County. Around Newport Beach, my rental car seemed to pull itself to the exit, and I found my way, without thinking or planning, to the skilled nursing facility where my mother had died the year before. All the women of that generation had died within 3 months of each other: my mother and two aunts. I was now feeling alone, the top of my head right under eternity, no generations between.

I was simply observing myself, the driver of this car that took me to that place. No feeling of sadness. But once I parked directly in front of the room, its picture window like a large-screen TV in front of a couch in a living room, I let my mind go blank, and a deep sob welled up. This is where my mom had no option except to die with two roommates during COVID-19 lockdown.

She had been a divorced mother of three, a full-time kindergarten teacher, an emotionally underdeveloped adult, and she was my shining star: my moon and my sky. The touch of her hand on my head was all I needed. Being in her vicinity but not touching her would also do. As a 5-year-old and the youngest, I had learned to use a bobby pin to pick the lock of the bedroom door that she had locked against me because she needed the time alone.

If someone had helped me through it then, if instead of my mother counting on 9-year-old me to be her confidante as she lamented her new marriage to my mean-spirited, opportunist stepfather, if as a child I would have been able to communicate my distress in some way that a caring adult could hear, I would not have spent decades of my life with a big chunk of my heart like a crying dog locked in a dark bathroom, the child locked out against her mother’s love. Now in front of the room in which she died, I cried for all of it. I felt her love pouring into me, the door to the bedroom unlocked, the “someone is here,” the earth remembering me and taking me back so tenderly. I had calmed down, and let the complicated love come toward me from every angle. I felt my mother’s love.

Recently, I went to a physical therapist about chronic pain on one side of my lower back, and the visit wasn’t what I expected, which was to be placed on a table, diagnosed, manipulated, exercised and sent home with a list of exercises to do on my own and another appointment on my calendar. Instead, I got a holistic lecture about getting my brain to agree with every movement I made so that it didn’t think it had to protect me by tightening up. I was a little annoyed because I could have watched such a talk on YouTube. But I went home and tried what he suggested, which was to keep my eyes on a focal point and walk in figure eights several times a day. In addition to that, I was to walk around my house barefoot, moving my whole body, consciously feeling every step on the bottom of my feet.

So, I walked through my house exaggerating all of this, having fun with it, wiggling with each step, fully feeling the bottom of each foot as it landed on the hardwood floor. When my foot landed perfectly on the dark spot of Skye’s water stain, I sucked in my breath. “Oh, Skye,” I said, and I dropped to the floor.

I looked into the dark stain with its odd sense of depth. But there was no heavy feeling. Maybe it was because when tears do their work of pulling the deep grief up and out, everything is a little lighter. I felt nothing but buoyant. Skye and I—two gals who’d helped each other was what we were. One locked in, and the other locked out. Now–no other sadnesses attached to the mooring rope. I let myself lie on the floor next to it and watched the afternoon sun spray the pine trees in my backyard with golden light.

“You love me,” I said to the light.