Simplicity

I came to the island and it wasn’t long before I knew for sure that I was the most unnatural and backwards creature there.

“We’re at camp,” Vaughn said. “You can have anything you want.”

It wasn’t the excess that attracted me; it was the simplicity. Trees thrived on only air water and soil, giving back an equivalent of everything they took. Bird glided high above, teaching their young how to swoop into the water for food. Thousands of years of evolution taught each species of snake to make the most of both the land and water. The mountains took over where the sky left off and the river commanded where the ground relented.

I became acutely aware of my own imbalance, my own desires, and since it takes more than two nights to de-evolve into nature, my mind and body never quite made it through panic stage. Something deep and secret in me tried desperately to hold on to what was familiar and backwards. The greed, the masochism, the humanness, while at the same time, another part of me, equally legitimate if not more so for its primitiveness, begged me to jump from one of the cliffs and surround myself in the water.

This is not how all people react to such a situation. Many surpass the challenge of balancing two existences. For them, there is only one existence and it encompasses all places and all experiences. For these people, lightness, not weight is the driving force.

Vaughn’s great uncle sat on the dock munching peanuts and spitting the shells and wondering about outer space.

“It’s hard to grasp that someday this won’t be here,” he said.

“Hmm. Yeah,” we sleepily reply.

Vaughn’s grandfather is a great adapter from what I can tell - a great bullshitter.

He points out the birds’ nests in the eves of the porch roof.

“That one’s a sparrow’s nest. They make them with mud. And that, well I don’t know what that it, but it’s been abandoned or else the mother would be flying back and forth all day.”

Today he’s an expert on bird nests, tomorrow he will go back to his 4000 foot contemporary mansion in Cazenovia, where he will plan his next excursion to the New York City arts district. He’s an expert there too.

Vaughn’s mind takes to the island with the same intensity it takes to life. Like me, he suffers the most, and thrives the most when there is weight, not lightness of being. He holds the perpetual burden and privilege as family mediator and peacemaker – the voice of reason.

The island grants no escapes from the quarrels of his family or his self-assigned role. It only adds to the fires in his head.

Here is a land that is completely harmonious, or would be without the presence of humans. There is no thought involved in the natural cycle of pain and joy. Vaughn somehow understands this so that the surroundings provide a severe distinction between his struggles and the world. In Syracuse, everyone struggles at least a little. Here, the battles are tenfold and dealt with internally, in solitude.

Vaughn has never been suicidal but this foreign and powerful brew of experiences thrusts the man into an existential meltdown.

“If I can’t do anything, than why should I do anything?”

I realize his dilemma and ban the word “existential” from the island, hoping it will ease his journey – at least for a day or two.

***

Before I had a chance to readapt or parish on the island, I had to leave that place.

I visited my mother’s hometown of Brockville before crossing the U.S. border. With a head full of twenty-one years of my mother’s horror stories about the town, it was much calmer and welcoming that I would have liked. The downtown streets were clean and neatly lined with shops. Parks at the waterfront were picturesque.

I intended to find the graveyard where my mother’s family is buried, but no matter how much I searched for Oakland Cemetery where the map said it would be, all I came across were recent suburban developments.

My parent’s family, I discovered too late, is buried in Old St. Peter’s cemetery, not Oakland. When I passed it on the way into the city, I reluctantly decided not to stop there just in case.

I felt my bloodline there. My eyes clouded and cleared in one instance.

There is no definition for the word "closure."

Leaving Canada felt a little like leaving a tormented womb for an more tormented, independent and necessary living.

***