Vacation

Hoot and Elizabeth sat for breakfast at a table for two in the Northwoods Café, near the shore of Lake Superior. A young woman and two young men walked in behind another young man propelling his own wheelchair. The men wore faded baseball caps, cotton shorts, boat shoes and cotton T-shirts. The woman wore khaki shorts and a pink blouse. Her fish earrings hung low along the line of her jaw. Above the slight and collapsed body in the wheelchair was the brightest face in the room, a face unburdened by the body below it. 

Excuse me, his smiling face seemed to say. Excuse me for this inconvenience that has turned my limbs to ropes. Don’t look troubled and don’t pity me. I am a happy and fortunate man. 

“Good morning,” he said to Hoot and Elizabeth. 

“Good morning,” they replied together. 

Elizabeth could not take her eyes off the man’s face, his full smile, green eyes and fine thin nose. 

“Beautiful morning, isn’t it?” the young woman said to Elizabeth. 

Elizabeth’s eyes scanned the faces at the table. She surmised that at least three of the four could be siblings. “Yes, it is. Gorgeous.”

“We’ll be out on the water in about a half-hour. What about you?”

“We won’t be on it, just beside it, and in it, if it’s not too cold.”

“That’s good,” the man in the wheelchair said. “Enjoy the day. The weather report calls for some big waves later so be careful out there.” 

Hoot did not envy the man and his family, but he wondered how his life would have been different if he had weekends free, if he and Elizabeth could think of a place to go without planning for the youth group or the ladies circle to join them. He wondered what it would be like to live in a house in a suburb, drive into a city to a comfortable office every weekday, come home in the evening for dinner, and have the weekend off. He and Elizabeth ate scrambled eggs and oatmeal quietly, aware of the nimble conversation next to them about father’s health, the second home in Duluth, the trouble with the blind poodle. 

Hoot left a ten-dollar tip for a twenty-five-dollar check and walked with Elizabeth to the register by the door, smiling and nodding at the three brothers and their sister.

On a public beach of Lake Superior the couple walked past a claim of chairs and umbrellas that looked like a family reunion. Two families with a few small children and one set of grandparents had put up nylon shade domes, set up striped beach chairs, and spread towels in a party camp. White and red coolers served as tables. A stiff wind held three bright kites above the little circle of generations. They were drawn to a patch of sand just beyond the personal space of a bearded man dressed only in plaid Bermuda shorts and a straw hat, his wire-rim spectacled face buried in a Civil War magazine. 

“How about this?” Elizabeth said.

Hoot spread a beach towel and unfolded a pair of low-slung canvas chairs. He crossed his arms in front of his body, peeled off his blue Adidas t-shirt and stood in a moment of self-consciousness. The torso he imagined he had was not the one he uncovered. 

Elizabeth unbuttoned her white cotton blouse and stepped out of her green gym shorts in a new navy bathing suit. She kicked off her sandals and winced at a cigarette butt at her feet. 

“Ick,” she said. “Do people still smoke?” 

A beach employee in khaki shorts and a monogrammed shirt ran through the sand in leather boots. His fringed knee socks bobbed. He held a two-way radio to his ear as he climbed the wooden ladder with a message for the young lifeguard who sat enthroned with a red baseball cap backwards on his head, and a white smear on the bridge of his nose.

“I love the beach and this lake,” Elizabeth said. I just don’t like it when people use the beach as an ashtray.”

“The beach is an ashtray, and we’re the butts,” Hoot replied. He squeezed sunscreen into his hand and onto his body as far as his arms could reach. “It’s a pretty dirty place, if you think of it: all these gulls poking around, more than at the dump, and overweight old people and kids dropping their garbage, sitting in the dirt—it really is just dirt—eating and sleeping like babies. The public beach is nature’s waiting room. I thought you knew that. It’s right next to the cleaning-lady ocean or in this case cleaning-lady lake, big enough to be an ocean. She does the best she can. And the water is healing, no matter what the shore looks like. The lake is like our step-mother, you know. The ocean is our mother. You always say that.” 

Elizabeth removed a plastic container of ice water from her beach bag. “I know,” she said. We’re all going back to it someday soon, if it doesn’t turn into a float of plastic.”

“We’re all waiting for something,” Hoot said. “Look at the people here. Some are waiting for their days to end. Some are waiting to grow up. Some are waiting for school to start. Some are waiting to take the next tide out, all of us offering our bodies, such as they are, to the sun and to the waves.”

“And to one another, right?” she said. “So, what are we waiting for, dear? Would you do my back?”

“Waiting for the fun to start. We’re the Youngdahls, on a Great Lakes vacation. You have to stand up or lie down if you want me to do your back.”

Elizabeth unfolded her towel and stretched out her body on it. Hoot squeezed out Coppertone in the tiny letters-L-O-V-E-on her back. 

“My back needs it too,” Hoot said.

“I thought you planned to read your book in the chair,” she said, resting the side of her head on the towel. 

“Right. I was. Sweet dreams.” 

“If I fall asleep, wake me up right away. I don’t want to burn.”

Hoot opened the magazine section of the newspaper and glanced at the front page. A Coast Guard helicopter shook the beach as it flew low off-shore, droning a beat against the sky. In another section of sky, a small plane trailed a banner with the call letters of a radio station from Duluth that claimed to rock the North Shore. Hoot noticed the waves rolling in heavier and thicker than he expected to see them.

Elizabeth reached into her bag for her journal and began to write.

The shore is our sanctuary and the holy place of our true religion. We were all born here, and this is where we all return in the end. Everything comes together here. The earth meets the water. The air is warmed by the great fire of the sun. The gods have their sacred communion here, and here the helpless, hairless creatures with giant brains gather without fear of any other creatures of earth, except maybe sharks. They shed their clothing and show their ridiculous naked bodies to the gods in the hope that the gods will bless them and not chose the best of them as a sacrifice. The humans eat and pay homage to the sun god and the sea god. The most beautiful are the high priests. The children are their acolytes.

Lake Superior was cold all year; today its waters came in high and hard. Young girls giggled and screamed as icy hands slapped their bodies. Young men hopped into the waves and flopped over smaller breakers or dove into and through larger ones. Swimmers bobbed in the rolls outside the breakwater. The lifeguard stood on the seat of his chair, craning his neck and shielding his eyes, his metal whistle between his teeth.

Elizabeth rolled over and rubbed sunscreen on her legs. 

“Put this stuff on the tops of your feet,” she said. “They’re the first part of your body to burn. You want me to do it for you? Your feet are so pale. They’ll burn.” 

Hoot picked up his feet and pointed his toes at her. She rubbed on sunscreen up to his ankles. 

“What are you reading?”  she asked.

“An article about anorexia and bulimia.”

The helicopter circled off-shore, banked and flew back along the beach. A Coast Guard patrol boat and three white pleasure boats buzzed in circles and zigzags in the haze.

“Look at this,” Hoot said, pointing out over the water. The helicopter hovered over the water, shimmering in its own spray. The four boats headed toward it. “I thought those guys were fishing. I don’t know what they’re doing now. Looks like they’re rescuing someone.”

The helicopter sank slowly to the surface of the water, sending up a bowl of spray. It stayed there, suspended for several minutes before lifting off deliberately and veering off sharply to the east.

When the first tinge of color began to show on the horizon, Hoot and Elizabeth gathered their things, folded the chairs, and did a duck-walk dance over the warm sand toward the parking lot. Hoot pointed out two women, deep into fat romance novels, who had allowed the sun to touch them in ways they would regret later. In front of the women two young men roughhoused with the waves, burying their faces in big swells.

Later, at the Shoreline Restaurant across from the A. O. Ochs Bed and Breakfast, a cheerful busboy poured water and said, “The lake’s calming down, finally. The wind was wild today. I heard something happened out there. The Coast Guard made a rescue. The folks over there told me they saw it. Did you see it?”

“I saw something out there. Impressive, the way the pilot maneuvered the chopper.”

Elizabeth ordered walleye and wild rice. Hoot had grilled pork chops and applesauce.

“I’m happy,” Elizabeth said, as they drank coffee and shared chocolate cheese cake. “I wasn’t happy earlier, but I am now. The lake makes me feel like a child again.”

“The water does that, makes us young again. What do you think of our new home, so far, after a few months? I’m good with it.”

“I’m good with it too. I don’t see too many trouble signs, do you?”

“No, the usual characters are in place; I knew they would be.” 

Conversation about the congregations they served was a part of their normal routine. Daily they processed the dynamics in the church, cultivating and weeding the ground, categorizing personalities, identifying trouble spots, clarifying issues so that no problem grew out of hand, no troublesome individual too threatening.  

“I can see that we’ll have some friends, and the church ladies haven’t shown their claws yet. They’ll come out in time, but I’ll handle them.”

Hoot pretended to crack a whip through the air. Over the years he had come to believe that tending a small congregation was a matter of managing personalities and blending voices. Keep the trouble-makers isolated, draw out the quiet humble ones, stroke the egos of the broken ones, encourage the unsure, pass out thank-you’s and compliments the way Herb Roiger, the State Bank Santa Claus, hands out popcorn balls and candy canes from the back of a hay wagon on Friday nights in December. Try to get the best out of the those most likely to make important contributions of time, through carefully timed public praise. Tamp down grumbling and criticism through messages folded carefully into sermons and newsletter messages. If an uneasy peace was maintained in the community, his work would be a success: Children would store good memories. Working families would have a public home in the community. At their deaths, the elders’ families would have people to support them.  

Elizabeth read her novel in bed. Hoot listened to the radio through headphones. He tuned his iPod radio to the local public radio station, WUMD, hoping he might hear a word about what happened in front of them on Lake Superior earlier that day. A man had drowned in the unusually high clear-sky waves. The man’s name was Robert Henry Newman, of Edina, Minnesota, twenty-eight years old. He had been sailing with his family when he fell overboard. His body drifted for half a mile in the heavy current before it was recovered by the Coast Guard. The announcer said that Mr. Newman suffered from muscular dystrophy. He was pronounced dead at St. Luke’s Hospital in Duluth.

When Hoot came to bed, Elizabeth was drifting off to asleep. The bright red shade of his bedside lamp bathed their bed in warm light. The night breeze carried the memory of wet skin. Hoot’s hands swirled and caressed both sides of his wife’s body. The moisture in the air seemed of the same composition as their bodies’ perspiration. Their sex was quiet with rhythm like lapping waves, light repetitions in the salty lap of the other. 

Elizabeth drifted off to sleep first. Before Hoot sank into sleep he felt a chill like a cold current. He saw the face of the young man and imagined his body floating. He saw a small boat aimed at the family’s sleek sloop, sailing far out, piloted by another brother. He saw liquid limbs lifted expertly from the small boat, the large rolling mother claiming her beautiful son, kissing his mouth and dancing with him.

He reached over and touched his wife’s shoulder.

“Hmm?” Elizabeth said, coming to the surface. “What is it, honey?”

Suddenly the night came in heavy on Hoot, filling his lungs, breaking over him, washing across his face and soaking the sheet over his feet.

“I’ll tell you in the morning. I’m fine now. Sorry I woke you. Good night.”

Elizabeth rolled over. He turned again to her breathing body and placed his arm on her back to feel the breath move in and out.

Photo by Riley Crawford on Unsplash.