Round Pond, Maine

The first thought is dad sprinting back and forth across 95 somewhere north of Boston. Like an old tabletop video game. Salvaging as many items of our wind-strewn clothing as he could. One of those tubes they make you stand in and the air blows the cash around. He must not have secured the suitcases well enough to the roof of the station wagon. Mitt Romney with a dog. Ours was safely inside though. An Irish setter named Arlo crouching in the backseat panting and staring dumbly at things he didn’t understand and didn’t need to anyway.

It doesn’t seem worth it to me now. Risking all of that. But I’ve never had to pay to clothe children. Especially ones that aren’t technically my own. 

My mother’s family had been coming summers to stay at a defunct cove-side motel in this no stoplight town since they were children. Then at a small house of their very own. Next door to one church and across the street from another. Imagine New England on a postcard. The one hundred year old general store. Lobster traps everywhere even on land. Fried clams and ice cream and cold sadness like the water a few inches beneath the parts the sun reaches. 

OK now imagine it all slightly poorer than what you were thinking. Just a town. A town in Maine. Sunburnt men in overalls who knew how to do things and then died early for having done them.

Over the years my grandmother took to decorating the house like a musty drawing room in a gothic romance. Velvet and lace and burgundy. A purposeful dimness to it. Miss Havisham’s cake. A vampire with a rusting lobster boat he kept meaning to take out on a cloudy day. 

She’d go on to live out the rest of her days there mostly alone. Not the full rest of her days but the rest of them before the last of them. Cobwebs everywhere. A tiny bathroom my dad built under the stairs that he also built. No flushing allowed unless it was absolutely necessary. The thick beams of the roof jagged with nails older than all of us pushing outward at impossible angles like gnarled claws. I worried when I was young what would happen if everything tipped upside down. 

Probably it was all beautiful once. Before I understood anything. Maybe I’m just remembering it in disrepair. The opposite of rose-colored glasses. 

Nothing made my dear mammy happier than any of us going to stay up there. Whether she was in residence or not. You have to go up there. My mother and my aunt still say that to me all the time. You have to go up there.

Saying it how you think they are saying it. That voice. 

My high school girlfriend and my college girlfriend and maybe my girlfriend after college I can’t remember anymore and then the last girlfriend I will ever have fingers crossed. There’s a picture of my wife and me sitting there on some early 2000s 4th of July. She’s all of 22 years old perhaps. My grandmother and aunt had made us put on silly Uncle Sam hats and I pouted because I was the coolest young man alive. I was going to be The Strokes in fact. But I did it nonetheless to please them and besides girls like it when you do things to please your grandmothers and aunts. 

We were out on the porch overlooking the working but not too densely busy harbor roughly a couple hundred yards away through a brush field that wanted scything and I wish I had now any idea what either of us were thinking at the time. We have so much time left. Something like that maybe. 

More likely not even being aware the meter was running. Joyriding in the taxi. 

We watched the Sound of Music on VHS that night. I’m just thinking of that now as she walks in from work. What movie did we watch in Maine that one time I said and she said the Sound of Music without even thinking about it. 

Another earlier time we came up alone and I made her pad thai with tuna. Tuna from a can. She has never let me forget that and that is fine I have that one coming.

I’m fishing off the docks at the marina and failing at the fishing and watching some older boys catching and then torturing a fish and I never fished again after that. Not even once. 

Jabbing the hook around in its mouth mangling it. Laughing as if it were the funniest joke you’d ever heard. Going look at me I’m a fish in a sadistic ventriloquism. I wanted to jab their mouths and push those kids into the water but I didn’t do that because I was a chubby little baby. 

Cousins and sisters and cousins jumping off an old mill pillar into a dark lagoon next to a once employed waterfall. Even the waterfalls out of work. Then drying and lounging on its stones we imagined as a glamorous beach. An actual beach too not far off. Out by a sort of famous lighthouse one would drive along the curving coast to see if one were driving around here and looking for things to see. To kill time. To feel as if one were in Maine. Scare quotes Maine. 

To kill a summer.

I climbed down once onto the sharp rocks by the lighthouse to breathe in the spray of the furious waves when my grandmother wasn’t looking. Maybe because she told me so many times to never do it. 

It doesn’t seem worth it to me now. Risking all of that. 

We’re no longer children. Some of us have our own. Not me but some of us. Most of us. 

I couldn’t handle that constant fear. That they could so easily be washed away any moment when you turned your back. Dragged out. Like I was asking for. I’m told there’s a lot of joy in the endeavor of parenting but it cannot compare to the agony of its ending. 

There are big signs down by the water now warning people off. Some people’s children aren’t here anymore to read them. 

I almost never climbed down onto any dangerous rocks ever again after one particular scare at the lighthouse until maybe twenty five years later. Ignoring a different sign this time by an entirely different ocean. A sudden tug and now being carried off and away I was reminded of the thrill seeking of youth but this time spoiled by an adult’s awareness of the consequence. The one consequence that matters.

I wasn’t actually thinking any of that at the time though that’s a lie. I was thinking oh fuck oh god. Please no. 

One single winter visit I can recall and never again after that. Having learned that lesson. 

So many different ways that water in one form or another wants to kill us. 

The snow isn’t as bad now I’m told though that’s bad in its own way. 

A high school friends trip and walking down to the lobster shack on the water swaggering like celebrities. In our stupid baseball caps. Girls! One of them was named Olive. I will never forget that for some reason. The stupid things that stick with us. She didn’t want to kiss me and this was a revelation because almost everyone I had ever met in my life had wanted to kiss me. 

A bachelor party with college buddies not long after graduation. Some of them jumped into the water off a bridge and had to claw their way up and out over the razor barnacled stones to get back to land. Their hands and feet red and raw. How that can be funny when you’re a young man. The self-inflicted wounds that you still have the rest of your life to heal from. Guess I can’t jackoff for a while haha. 

Like that. 

A cousin’s wedding at a dockside restaurant the next town over near the squat 17th century stone fort we used to run around inside of. Pretending to shoot the cannons at the French or the Natives or whoever it was they were shooting the cannons at back then. Something forced about this particular later in life trip though. Too old now to appreciate even the nostalgia which had been hammered and folded over and over so many years into a blunt flatness. Nostalgia for a prior nostalgia diminishing. 

You have to go up there  my mother said the other day and one thousand other days before that and I should but I’m not going to. It’s too far away. Both meanings. 

Another trip with my bandmates mid-twenties. Asking them not to bring drugs with us just for this one weekend. This is not a place where you do cocaine. I suppose a lot of people do heroin thereabouts now but not then. One of them lied and said they scored on the way to fuck with me and I got so mad I pulled the car over and went and sat and watched a little league baseball game alone.

I knew things were heading in a bad direction with respect to all of that. Some people’s children died but not me. Washed away.

We concocted a serial killer villain called the Bee Keeper that night after seeing a normal innocent (or was he?) one on the main road into town and he haunted us that entire weekend even though we all knew that we were scaring ourselves. It didn’t matter that the Bee Keeper wasn’t real he became so when it got so dark the entire sky was stars and you could hear a twig snap. You could hear the silence of the two churches. What their emptiness implied. 

The last time we were all there together my own family and the extended family we left my grandmother to float away into the water. It went smoothly. The throwing of her ashes. These sorts of things are more difficult than you think to get right. 

Some of my nieces wrote letters to her in bottles and threw them out. 

If I had written one I would have said I love you so much and I think about you almost every day but you fucked us all up so badly. 

I swear to god she did but we love her all the same. Perhaps even more for it. We are all so sick.

I don’t know what else there was.

I wish now in this moment that I had held onto more of the memories. Had collected as many of them as I could. But the highway is too broad and everything is moving with such speed so this is the best that I could do. Bundled some of them close to my chest in the wind and cut my losses and drove off to where I was going to be going to next.

If you loved this story, send it to a friend, recommend it on socials... and Subscribe to Flaming Hydra.