Even though Mamie says its illegal, she makes it sound like an invitation.  Out one side of her mouth she’s making my childhood sound like a party or a beer commercial, the riotous fun we had before seatbelts, sun-shirts and bottled water.  “‘We’ used to jump off that bridge…” she says, describing the stone structure built across an elbow of the Hubbard River.  It was probably 20 feet above a dark pool, deep in places but also filled with rocks and outcroppings under the water.  Today, the bridge is a fresh-poured concrete, industrial looking jobbie, built up higher when they raised and re-paved the road.  The kids look at their grandmother like she’s either crazy or describing a different rebel wildchild than this ol’ gray-haired Auntie/mommy who got them here, all seatbelts and sanitizer-like.  That bridge?! It’s got to be 40 feet above the creek!  Then, it was a crumbling aggregate footbridge built decades before by the Army Corps of Engineers and quietly becoming part of the landscape.  As I recall, it begged us to jump.  But in the same breath, she says Oh, no, you can’t do it now. My boys are listening to every word, and shortly before we leave for this hike Will and Aaron quietly slip into swim trunks and water shoes.  You never know…  Out the other side she’s telling them it’s forbidden. Illegal and there’s no way. Brief aside, of course, is it’s been too long since Mom and a teen boy have crossed paths. The words “It’s forbidden,” when translated into Teenspeak, mean “Let me know how it goes.” The words “You can’t” are just another way of saying “I’ll hold your shoes.”  Does she know this?  She does.  She must.  She’s the Queen of didn’t mean, the wizard of why not, the master of all the wonderful things that can be, if you just speak up and tell life why you’re here.  I suspect she is in the back bedroom shimmying on her suit as well.

Maybe we really did have a wild time in the water back then. I learned to swim in a town pond that was one part water, two parts silt. Stand too long watching your instructor demonstrate and you’ll have to un-suck your legs from the muck just to propel forward. Jumping from a dock into the weeds and pond grass that played just below the visible surface of the water made you a 10-year-old protagonist in your own summer murder novel, long, Prell-shampooed hair splayed out behind you in the black water.  Unlike the chlorinated, crystal-clear pool set, we knew we swam with stuff. Fish, turtles. If the murky, squishy bottom didn’t teach you to kick, kick, kick! then the stuff that bumped against your legs did. See a tiny head like a turtle but not a turtle, and we learned to swim fast. Once upon a summer afternoon I was part of another crazy scheme of Mom’s, speaking of serpents. To surprise a friend on her birthday she and a group of friends constructed a giant paper-mache Loch Ness monster.  For weeks they worked. The “humps” and tail they lashed to inner tubes, while the head would be propelled by more than one person in a small boat. The point was to get in the lake and swim the pieces in well-spaced, prehistoric megladon intervals, so that birthday friend would look out across the water and see ol’ Nessie approaching from afar. Instead, the threat of a thunderstorm and the logistics of the operation–never tested, only tried–put some of the swimming pieces out of synch out on the lake. The humps kept bumping into one another and clumping, most un-monster-like, and because the head piece was so much heavier and had to be rowed by boat, it kept getting lapped by the tail, who wanted to hurry and get this over with. Dang. I didn’t know sea creatures swore like that.

The stream, now a river with all the recent rain, runs into a reservoir of the Barkhamsted watershed. No one wants your skivvies and dirty feet in their drinking water, son. Times have changed. Out the other side, a sort of a Pooh-sticks musing: Now, back in the day… and she launches into tales of us as teens over thirty years ago, jumping off bridges, besting each other as to who could find the highest rock ledge to leap from, riding our cut-offs down to just “offs” on the rock slide into a frothing pool of that dark, frigid water. Swimming and splashing and whooping it up, loud enough for the bears to hear and bring the guys with their “no trespassing” signs. The one on the highest part of the rock cliff overhanging the water is much older, made of vertical wooden planks, and the right third of the sign has been broken away to leave an altered message:

Absolute-
No div-
Allow-

Okay good. Glad you’re 100% sure about it. We weren’t planning to “divvy” anything up. Or “divine” it either, and I can’t think of many other verbs truncated that way, except the verb. Don’t worry, nice Mr. Park Ranger, sir.  We’ll keep it together.  But we were thinking to swim, and maybe even… jump in? That’s not on your little sign, here.  Some of it is simple propriety. Squatter’s rights on a memory–We’ve been here so many times we practically own the place… That and the reality of a small town–if he shows up in his fancy uniform and forestry degree from the local college, chances are high that Mom will have had him in grade school somewhere along the line, or know his mamma. Same with the town cop who pulls you over.  I, a babysitter for many years in this town, will have changed his diapers.  What’s he going to do, write us a ticket for “swimming in water”? Why, officer, I wouldn’t dream of diving. When we go into this creek it will be heart-first, any way, not head.

Granville State Forest. Mamie’s pick for our last day, and a “hike” she says she can do.  It’s where she and I went looking for the “deep hole” last fall–ski pole, lip stick, and all (See Selfie, October 2019).  Funny how the monuments of our youth sound as though they’ve all been named by a six-year-old: “deep hole”…”big rock”…”old bridge.”  Thanks for the trip to Obviousville, kid. Must have ‘gived’ that some real thought.  Apparently, my sixth grade class camped out here, in these woods.  As I recall it was a test run for that Field Trip ’77 (See Homeward Bound, July 2020).  Do I remember this event? Not really. According to Mom, the bus dropped us all off here for three days, a pack of preteens, and at the end of our stay we shouldered our gear and walked back to school.  A whole class of kids–eleven and twelve years old!  It’s four miles down a mountain back to town!  I’m not going to say anything about bare feet or snow, but still.  The idea of a class today at Oak Knoll making it outside to a fire drill or down the lunch hall in one orderly piece is mind boggling.  And yet, there are similarities.  The survival skills and wilderness appreciation they tried to instill were lost to timeless pre-teen social dramas, like Ethan E. consuming eight or nine hotdogs at one sitting by biting them in half and swallowing them (almost) whole.  For his next trick, he vomited them up in bite-sized chunks — right into the hair of Allison H., who was seated in front of him.  Yes, long hair, and yes, long blond hair.  Story wouldn’t be the same if it hadn’t been the same girl he had a wicked crush on.  You can’t make this stuff up.

Nature makes for a fine a classroom, a most skilled and patient educator. Today, the woods are electric green and so lush they look like a northern hemisphere rainforest: moss and shadows on the dappled forest floor, low-branched hemlocks and the whole terrain scattered with rocks, like the glacier got called to dinner and left its toys strewn about.  Twenty thousand years ago, which feels about as long as my memory reaches, this region was under mountains of ice miles thick.  When the glaciers began to melt and move and carve out stream beds around which forests grew, they carried their deposits of what would become soil, and sand and stream banks, forming the chunked rock landscape of even some of the flattest terrain in new England, there would be that random huge one too heavy to be carried along.  When the glacier melted, there it sat: a glacial erratic. Do I need a metaphor more obvious for this 85-lb monolith walking beside me? Too huge, too different, too unique to “go with the flow,” these erratics, in Mom’s less scientific summary, “They stayed put.” Huh.  How ’bout that.  I think about the 40 plus years–close to half a century–she has kept up a home for us to come home to.  Staying put.  And the deepest places where the memories pool.

Mom and I move with torrent-like intent and glacial speed. Wildest thing is, we are passing by old structures that were falling down back then. They still are. The observation makes my mind wander. And wonder….Do you get to a certain point of decrepitude and just get to rest there? I surely hope so. That would be nice. The stream to our left, like a walking partner, weaves through the trees and over its rocky bed, reasonably high for this time of year. Sure enough, out of it every so often loom huge rocks, bigger than a car that no way, no how were carried here by water. Massive boulders the size of a mini planet just sitting there in the middle of the stream. There has been rain, even inside our week-long visit (like every time they tried to bike, beach or play tennis this week there’s been rain).  It’s full enough that the moving water makes noise and is growing nosier as we approach our destination, a sort of chute-style waterfall spilling into the “deep hole.” We used to swim there, and yes, jump from the rocks into a pool below. I am hurrying to get there because I am afraid my memory has misfiled this one and it will be nothing but a puddle between two rocks. My boys wouldn’t leap into that, would they?

I have the strongest experience of being at once two people. Ahead of me, the ones who grumbled about going on this hike are walking in a tight pack. They look like teen protagonists in a B-rate Jurassic-Park-meets-Hunger-Games movie. Their way of moving and looking at the landscape betrays their suburban upbringing: they look put here. They walk with sidewalk feet and structured eyes, keep their hands in close to their bodies and watch the woods from the corners of their eyes. Peripheral. Maybe only tent boy, who moved out during quarantine to live in our woods for near seven weeks, gets it full-on. He is half on the path, half off, orbiting the group and going deeper into the wood, picking up sticks, tossing rocks, swinging his arms, engaging his surroundings. Even here they have the air of the entitled, as if this primordial wonderland was not only discovered first by them but surely created for them.

By my side, the generation who knows better. She can’t get six feet for noticing something. She wants me to stop and take pictures along the way–the boulder covered in fern making it look like a giant chia pet, the huge stump parked near a fallen tree where a pile of cracked nuts and shells clue us to some critter’s table for one, a particular mineral deposit in that rock formation over there, the lovely, low-growing berried Wintergreen, otherwise known as Teabury plant or Gaultheria procumbens. She moves slowly, fully engaged in her surroundings if not paralyzed by them. I match her pace, or I try.  Mom is the only one I know who can walk standing perfectly still. For the day is long, and where have we to be?  She is as unsure of her body and locomotion as they are certain of theirs.  She’s been here before, and knows the way, and is barely moving.  They haven’t, and don’t, and are nonetheless crashing ahead (there’s no noise, but isn’t that the term you use when people are going ahead without waiting?)  As Will’s body leaps over rocks and fallen branches, I’m sure her mind and memory outpace him even as her body inches its way slowly along the same path.  Like his, there is not one cell in her that will say “no” to these woods, this wilderness, or to life.  Cane (OK, Mom, ski pole) in one hand, swatting me away with the other, she makes her way over roots, rocks, dips and downsteps, headed off the path and to the waterhole they have found.

And there she is.  The actual setting and the place holder in my mind match pretty well: stream has stopped its relentless course to offer up this in the middle of the wood: A wide, deep pool of ale-color water, still and cold. Ice-cold no doubt and shimmering in the afternoon sun, laid out below us like a promise: I told you I’d be here when you got back. I am not so old that I can’t hear it, the invitation. Why else would my wandering mind make a mental note just now that I am not wearing bathing suit? The pool is fed by a small waterfall from the rock ledge on which we stand, surveying our find. More of a water chute or surge than a fall, in that the current has carved a nice slide through the boulders and need not to go airborne to get where it’s going. Slide? Will looks back at me. Did somebody say slide? Aaron is already to the edge, contemplating the water. Mom I park near the banks of this settling, on some raised Hemlock roots and join the youth out on the cliff. I know what his eyes are asking. I know what he wants to know. So, where did you used to jump, Auntie Jen? I answer by pointing. There. Right in the middle. Then I point directly below us: you can’t see them but there are big rocks there, at the base of this thing. You’ll feel them when you get down there, just swim carefully.  If you really are going to jump then get as far out as you can, away from this ledge. Will joins us, standing there. For him, the words “if” and “jump” do not occur in the same language. In the land of boy are only verbs, no conditionals.  As I turn back to Mom and make my way off the edge of the cliff, out the corner of my eye Aaron is shucking his shoes and shirt and before I can turn around fully he takes a breath and a flying leap and ka-splash! makes contact with the water right where I showed him.  He comes up yelling.  Careful, boy!  Don’t want to bring the Ranger in on our party.  The girls want no part in this insanity, but Mom is hollering for more and trying to get turned around on the neck-breaker terrain so she can see better.  Will stands in the same spot, eyeing the water, sizing up the stunt and uncharacteristically reticent.  Is it all those rocks, son?  Is it this daredevil height or the arctic water temps?  After Aaron clambers back up the ledge, grinning and shaking his head and takes another jump, and another, his sister is suddenly shirtless and joining him.  Will stands, watching.

Water. Was a day I collected it: “Waters of the World” I called my collection, still tucked away in a shoe box under the bathroom sink. They were tiny liquor and perfume bottles I had picked up in my travels and filled likewise: the Seine, the Thames, the Marne, the Loire. I was obsessed. I once hopped off a train passing through Spain into France to get water from La Garonne and managed to burst back on before the stop ended and the train took off. Today, many of the little bottles are empty or half-filled with a cloudy, bacterial cocktail. One of my specimens even has a floating ball of something dark and furry in it that wasn’t there when I collected it. Some have evaporated altogether. These days I have moved on to rocks as my souvenir of choice. (See The Call of the Void, July 2020).  A lot heavier, to be sure, but a little more reliable. Thing about collecting water is, you can’t.  It moves as the times: ever changing and unstoppable.  “You cannot step twice into the same river,” said Heraclitus in the 6th century BC. Only, Plato misquoted him. What he actually wrote was a little more metaphysical: “In the same river we both step and do not step, we are and are not.” Got that, you top colleges types? All is flux. Ancient geological topography goes well with ancient philosophy. Heraclitus himself would nod with agreement at my revelation. And at my evidence: One glance at the five of them scattered about this rock play yard and swimming hole tells the same. They are not quite replacements for the pack evaporated from here years ago, but close… close. I used to beg Sophie to stay seven. Okay, eight. Eight and no older. A little joke, Mommy and me. She was my baby for those four and a half years before William, the one whose job it was to caboose our family, and on her I settled all that “last baby” love, which of course she shirked, and in toothless winking wondrous defiance, grew up anyway. Look at me, Mom. The “selfie” of a six-year-old, stripped of self-consciousness. Today, her lovely incorporates all this, like an embrace.

Though she will not be throwing herself from this rock precipice, Will will be. What else, with that name like his? What was I thinking, naming a boy child after volition? A child whose life would be filled with firecrackers, gasoline, power tools, black diamond bike trails, small arms, dizzying heights and deep holes–“Hey Will, wanna go on a 20-mile hike and shoot stuff around a blazing campfire and not shower for days? Hey Will, wanna go 30 mph in a moving vehicle made of tubular steel with zero suspension 4″ off the ground? Should have named him Steve. As I watch them all and watch their grandmother watch them, I know she looks on approvingly. They do not look like city inserts in a world of wild elements–rocks, water, woods. They do not look as they have been air brushed in or the products of good CGI. Personally, I am impressed with Duke boy, normally so reserved and too smart for ordinary converse, usually eyeing his wildman cousin with reserve. Let nature make a real man of you, son. He’s on his sixth or seventh jump. As I so many years ago, and nature buff Mom (a woman for whom you do not want to use that word when she gets around water)–they belong here. They know what to do. I’ll give you “no diving.” Child’s play. This summer we are living under the motherload of restriction: no graduating, no traveling, no time with friends, no field trips, no soccer, Scouts or shopping; no concerts, cookouts or theater. That’s what we’ve been living for over three months. And now, in the middle of the woods on a hot summer afternoon–no swimming? For heaven’s sake, life, give it up. No thinking, no feeling, no breathing, no being. That’s the same thing the pandemic said to me. On my way out the door.

I got a place name for you, little one. “Real Life.”  I grew up here.  To be intentional about “outdoor time” would have been to think about our breathing. So when my last in line pulls back his arms and takes a flying leap off the rocks to the pool below, my heart leaps with him.