Nature and Adventure

I settled in to the new routine.  I lived far from my high school now, and I didn't tell anyone about it.  The place I lived in with my father was crummy.  Nobody would be coming out.  

But there was a sort of idyl about it, too.  It was rural, or almost so, and I drove through wonderful as yet under-spoiled landscapes every day.  My father had grown up on a farm and had seen little until he joined the navy in World War II.  He served in the Pacific, but like most fathers who were in the war, he rarely spoke of it.  More than anything, I think, it had given him the travel bug, and several times in my life he quit his job and loaded up a trailer full of travel gear and took the family cross-country to camp and hike and explore.  Back home, he was the local equivalent of Lowell Thomas, and he enjoyed the near-celebrity status, inviting people over to sit in the dark and watch the flickering 8mm travel films he had made, documentary comments included.  I had watched those films my whole life and the narration never changed.  He would tell the same stories in the same places and laugh exactly as he had before.  My childhood memories were made up of those films and those stories and of my father's "itchy feet."  

Travel and adventure were what he craved and what we talked about now.  In the summer, the little cracker box house was too hot to inhabit, so we would go to dinner at a fancy French restaurant in a redneck town and sit in the cool of the air conditioning for awhile, but it was really a torture going back into the heat after dinner, so we took to buying some quick food like Kentucky Fried Chicken and going to the big lake that was part of the big, famous river to eat, to sit in the shade, and to look at the boats in the harbor.  Dad wanted to buy a sailboat, he said, and go sailing for awhile.  For me, of course, he was a sailor having been in the navy in World War II and having owned a couple of motor boats over the years.  It was of course a fanciful misconception on my part, but necessary, perhaps, or at least desirable.  

One night, he struck up a conversation with a man on one of the larger sailboats in the marina who was happy to tell us his harrowing tales of crossing the Gulf Stream in a storm, of getting blown off course, of giant waves that threatened to sink the boat, a tale and a storm and a heroic survival.  It was dangerous out there, he said, and not for everybody.  

When he was gone, my father gave me a look and bobbed his head up and down saying nothing.  I felt happy and emboldened by this second hand adventure.  

During the time I was living with my father, there was a tremendous series on television that we watched religiously, "The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau," and for that hour, I sat enraptured.  Escape, I thought, to sail around the world for adventure, to be part of that would be the most glorious of things.  There were National Geographic specials and the weekly "Wild Kingdom" with Marlin Perkins and other outdoor shows we watched together, something unspoken passing between us, some understanding of what real life was and meant, a life lived outdoors and outside the bounds of social convention.  

Driving home one sunset past a field of wild grasses that went on forever, the sun's last rays firing the field in orange and crimson and gold, a small red fox stopped and stared at me, straight into my eyes.  I was only a boy in a passing car, but for a timeless instant, we seemed conjoined.  Everything at that moment seemed to slow, my vision becoming telescopic, zooming in on that fox, bringing it closer.  There are moments you can never forget that seem random, even inconsequential, but that somehow have a greater meaning you never decipher, the stuff you read about in legend and lore.  For nights, that fox, that field, that sunset were in my dreams.   I've never talked about it or tried to explain it.  It was just something my father gave me.