JUNE 7, 2023 – (Cont.) Mother’s virtuosity with the slide rule also made me think that I should cut her some slack. For a second, it occurred to me that her wackiness, which could embarrass me so much in public, might be related to her brilliance.
A person acquainted with that brilliance but oblivious to Mother’s wackiness might well have concluded that her obsession with nautical processes up at the lake was directly related to her background as an engineer. But I knew better, and it made me angry. The sight itself was something to behold, an operation that was a cross between launching the Queen Mary and bringing the wounded Apollo 13 capsule back to earth. It transpired on a Saturday afternoon in late August when Mother was 80.
I had hiked down the shoreline from the “Red Cabin,” as my wife and I call our lacustrian summer home, to Mother and Dad’s cabin at the top of a steep, wooded bank overlooking Grindstone Lake in northwestern Wisconsin. Though it was a perfectly nice day outside, the cabin was shut off from the very atmosphere that would cause someone to want to have a cabin there in the first place. All the windows and doors were shut, shades down, curtains pulled. Dad sat in his rocker, reading his latest book on the American Revolution, and Mother was on the sofa, engrossed in an article in a dated issue of Scientific American.
Both greeted me as I entered their cave, and I returned their hellos and asked how they were doing. We exchanged some small talk. And then it started.
“Say, Eric, when are you going to put the dock in so I can use my canoe?” Mother asked.
“Actually, Mother, I’m not going to put it in.” The question surprised me. The two of them hadn’t opened the cabin that season until the Fourth of July weekend, and the time since then had been interrupted by frequent trips home to Anoka for one doctor or dentist appointment or another. Moreover, the shoreline where their dock had to be installed was rocky and challenging and involved half a day of hard, sometimes dangerous labor, and with my own two, able-bodied, teenage sons engaged in distractions at home in the cities, I would be pretty much on my own with the cabin-ritual project. As I had predicted earlier in the season, Mother had had few if any opportunities to go out in her canoe, and this was the very first time when she had even mentioned the possibility. I explained this all to her.
“Oh I know you’re terribly busy, but that canoe is something that’s really good for me, and I have to tell you, Eric, that I’m disappointed, that’s all. I’m not criticizing you. I’m just informing you.”
“But Mother, you can come down to our place any time. It’s so much easier down there.”
“Not when you’re not up here. You’re not up here during the week.”
“But I’m here now. I’m here on most weekends, and you yourself haven’t been around much, and when you are, Dad is here too, and he can help you.”
“Yes, but if he’s out in the woods cutting firewood or down in the basement working on a project and I want to go out, then he’s not there to help me.”
“So, you plan a little ahead and tell him you want to go out in the canoe and he should stick around and help you.”
“I’m not going anywhere,” Dad said, tentatively joining the conversation. His tone betrayed frustration with her.
“Mother, it’s not as if you’re always going out in the canoe. You simply tell Dad you need some help, he helps, you go out in the canoe.”
“But the canoe is here not at your place.”
“That’s my point. We park the canoe down at our place where it’s a cinch to get in and out of the water. You simply hike down there.”
“It’s a long way down there.”
“Then you take the car around. It’s not that far to drive.”
“I don’t like to drive up here.”
“Then Dad can drive you over there.”
“But he’s too busy.”
“You arrange it.”
“I can drive you,” Dad said, with a hint of cooperation—and guilt—in his voice.
“But then I’d have to walk from the car to your dock.”
“Mother, that’s a much shorter distance than it is from the cabin here, down the hill to where your dock would be. Plus, you have to climb back up the hill and it’s very steep, whereas our place is flat—no hill, no steps, just flat out from the car behind our cabin, around front and straight out on the dock.
“Your dock is different.”
“It’s easier than yours. You don’t have to walk down two flights of steps from the shore to the dock, for one thing, and the dock itself isn’t as far off the water as yours is. It’s just all around easier, Mother.”
One end of her mouth turned up in her trademark kind of smile that projected displeasure with my argument. “Look, don’t tell me what’s easier. I have everything very carefully worked out, and now you’re telling me I have to figure out something entirely different, and you people just don’t understand that what I have worked out is much easier for me.”
“What do you have so carefully worked out?”
“I have a system for getting the canoe into the water and then for getting myself in the canoe, and you just don’t understand.”
“Help me understand.”
“You don’t have a ladder on your dock. Do you have a ladder on your dock?”
“Mother, we don’t need a ladder on our dock, because it’s much closer to the water than your dock is, and that’s what I’m trying to tell you, that because our dock is much lower, it will be much easier, much safer for you to get into the canoe from our dock.”
“Will you help me right now?”
“Yes.”
“But what about when you’re not around?”
“Mother, we already covered that. There will never be a time when either Dad is not around or I’m not around to help you. Besides, it’s not like you’re always able or wanting to go out in the canoe. You only want to go out when it’s perfectly calm, and the water isn’t perfectly calm a lot of the time. And you’re reading and doing other things much of the time and even when the dock has been up in years past, how much have you used the canoe?”
“It’s not a question of how much I use it.” She was getting perturbed with me. “It’s a question of having things ready so that when I do want to go out, I can.”
“Okay. Let’s go now. I’ll help you now.”
“Well, I’ll have to get ready.” As she got out of her chair out on the front porch, I grabbed her paddle from the corner.
“I’ll paddle the canoe down to our place,” I said.
“No,” she said. “I want to show you how I launch the canoe.”
“Eric can get the canoe into the water,” Dad said, as if he were delivering a reprimand. He had little patience for these kinds of exchanges, even if he wasn’t a primary participant.
“But I want to make sure that he has the ballast in the right place and the lines tied in the correct spot.”
“You can show me down at our dock, Mom.”
“Look, will you please stop arguing with me?”
“Okay, okay. I’ll meet you down by the canoe and you can show me how to launch it.” As I exited the front of the cabin, I pushed the screen door extra hard so that the resulting slam would serve as an appropriately punctuated expletive. (Cont.)
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© 2023 by Eric Nilsson
