Emily Millikan works in private health care and nonprofit administration. Originally from Indiana, she now lives north of Boston. She finds her writing community in Image Journal's Glen Workshops.
The sky is twice as big today for the
clouds, as big as two skies, too much sky to count. And the land is a
heavy festival of green. At Back Beach the ocean smells like a lake,
and at Front Beach what breezes come from the water are laden with
sunscreen before they reach the sidewalk. I see a woman dancing by
the water, her ears plugged and wires attached to a black box at her
waist. She dances slow and thoughtful, a pointed toe, an outstretched
arm along the line of sand, beckoning into some middle place between
land and sky. From a distance, with her soft green shirt and black
capris and the thick dark braid down her back, she looks like my
cousin Carmen who lives deep in the mountains of California.
It is damp and warm enough that not
long after I reach town I shed my jacket and then my hoodie and push
my sleeves up. Two Crystal Transport buses are parked at the triangle
intersection in downtown Rockport, filling up half the road from Ray
Moore’s Fish Shack nearly to the Village Silversmith. Older couples
hold hands and glance at me and smile and hi softly as we pass. The
footpath to the headlands, paved but lumpy, narrow as a boy’s hips,
is littered with tree-confetti, and the weeds that look like thin
green wheat bob their heads over into the path, brushing my knees.
When I step out onto the rocks the whole of the promontory is empty,
no teenagers’ chatter wafting up from the Teeth, only, a moment
later, the murmer of three quiet tourists in black with big quiet
black cameras. They come from behind me and I hear them before I see
them. We ignore each other. I stay on the side opposite Rockport,
looking out over the water and the few houses on the shoreline to the
south. For a few minutes my mind is drenched with what keeps me up at
night, and these things blind me from behind my eyeballs. Just before
I leave I remember to be present with the sky and the water, to see
them. Both remain when I walk away and pick over the rocks toward the
dark opening in the woods. Whenever I walk on the headlands I think
of no particular path, instead let my feet decide which small rocks
will form a path to and from the view, let my eyes decide when my
feet should stop moving and stand me to look.
On the way back the birds swoop low to
the rocks below me at Back Beach, mostly underwater now at high tide.
It still smells like lake, the musty scent of swan droppings and duck
droppings and rotting boards. It’s the smell of the lake next door
to my late grandparents' house in Indiana. Both the front lake and
the back lake there belong to their neighbors, Betty and the late
Jack (Back ‘n’ Jetty, my dad calls them). My mother swam in both
when she was young, but we only swam in the back.
I was with my ex-boyfriend the last
time I walked back to the lake. We were looking for someplace to be
alone: kissing was one of the few pleasures left, since every time we
talked we’d argue, or if we weren’t arguing we were talking with
a strained politeness that made conversation neither intimate nor
interesting. But it was a poor use for that property; if you were
looking for somewhere to sit in peace it offered little. The swans
were nesting that time of year and chased us away from every bench
before ten minutes had passed.
No, swimming was the proper use for
Back and Jetty’s lake-at-the-back. My sister and brother and cousin
and I would fly there from our grandparents' porch, cold in wet
bathing suits, through the gap in the pine trees like a wide green
door between our grandparents' land and theirs, pounding up the brick
path in bare feet, slowing down at the A-frame lake house with its
roof pointed like an arrowhead. We'd slow down rounding the house and
look out at the roofed lake-gazebo, then the big pipes that
surrounded the diving board, padding warily through the stubbly grass
because the swans, we all knew, could kill you. Then we’d follow a
waist-high brick wall until it gapped, step through to sand, and
tiptoe over the green swan-droppings to find a clean place on the
wall for our towels. The water was warm and murky, deep brown-green
with lake slime and seaweed and swan waste. Slippery on the bottom,
depending. You could pee in that lake a foot from shore and no one
would know the difference.
The swans eyed us from across the
water, sometimes swinging over in a loop for drive-by surveillance
just close enough to scare us onto the shore, but not close enough to
keep us there.
We’d get ourselves wet and then take
turns on the rope swing, which was the cosmic center and purpose of
the lake’s existence. The rope swing hung from a high wooden pole,
how high in feet I don’t know but high enough that the top seemed
immeasurably far, a skyscraper. We only ever touched as high as the
top knot. The bottom knot was tied just above the enormous frayed
end, and the knots continued up the rope, a forearm’s length
between each, up to the topmost knots which were spaced closer
together as the danger of using them increased.
For we did not swing on the rope from
shore, no sirree. The rope swing was partnered eternally with high
metal stairs climbing up to air, the first step anchored in the sand.
The great wooden pole looked like a
fishing line, rooted in the bushes at the side of the beach and
angling out over the water. The rope hung straight, just within reach
if one stood at the toes’ edge of the swan-dirtied sand and snagged
it with a little finger, pulled it up and back with a little slack in
the line to the first step… the second step… the third step…
I'd work my way up, swinging out first
from the fifth or sixth step so that jumping off into the water was
more a matter of wading. But finally I’d reach the top step and the
top knot, and then the very top platform of the stairs with just hot
Indiana wind behind me and the heavy rope tugging in front. I’d let
go of the rope on the way back to shore; I was never much of a
swimmer and didn’t like falling from such a height, out over the
water where it began to get deep. But I’d go to the top of the
steps. We called the steps “the ladder,” though it was supported
at the back; and the point of swinging from the top of the ladder,
anyway, was not jumping into the lake. Not for me. For me it was the
swing out through nothing, the view from on high.
When we were tired of swimming, our
hands raw and red, we’d dry off and then go jump on the big
trampoline in the clearing. My mother had told us more than once
about her cousin who had broken her arm jumping on that very same
trampoline: what limb I’ve forgotten, but a terrific and memorable
break. The apex of each jump where anything might go wrong was filled
with a kind of holy and delightful terror. Sometimes it overcame me,
and I stopped jumping to watch.
I was always more of an indoor-reader
in the summer than an outdoor-swimmer, and I put on my wet bathing
suit with reluctance. When I got older I stopped putting on my
bathing suit at all, and I’d walk with my mother and aunts to look
at Jack and Betty’s sculpted gardens. Their backyard was used for
weddings or receptions; couples took pictures in the gazebo or out at
the tiny waterfall behind the lake. Many of our family pictures were
taken there. As we walked we’d bend to smell each new bed or pot of
flowers, or the ones flourishing the brightest, or with the strongest
smells.
Here too I smell those same flowers:
petals white, I imagine, though both here and at Jack and Betty’s
the flowers were of all colors. But they smell white, a heavy white
as if magnolias were the sum of all blossom. All green moist things
make light in themselves under the woods, and the air is like a mild
green tea, soft.
*
After work tonight the hill outside my
house smells like the Smoky Mountains, or maybe all the woods I have
ever known. These places are transposed so easily. The place I live
becomes a foreign land bordered by the countries I remember, the
countries my senses understand, the landscapes where I am awake. This
is new country and I am often asleep in it, so that it remains
foreign yet a while.
