Roads and Water

The pier runs out into the ocean and stops right where the boats come and go, come and go. When they built it, they knew exactly where people wanted to stop their boats. When I run its length, the mist curling around me like smoke, I stop at its end and place my big toe toe on the edge. And I watch, the few feet I can see beyond the pier, and I wonder how they knew right where to stop building. The boats come and go and take it for granted.

They built the roads the same way. Each one is exactly as long as it has to be, except sometimes they run out of road and you have to drive on dirt or gravel instead. Long strips of road overlap and transform into different streets when the signs say to and sometimes they go on and on, a gentle motion against my back and neck while streetlights whoosh by, too many to count, and Dad sits looking where the headlights show him and his voice is tight and low when says something to Mom about money. I’m sure some roads would go on forever, except they have to stop at the ocean. Even then there are piers that go where the roads will not so people with boats can embark and float off.

We never had a boat. Our freedom was a little cabin by the lake, or it used to be. I was too young to understand why we stopped going there for vacation, only that I missed it and Dad would not talk about it.

Men and older boys would take their boats from that pier in the morning fog, or they lingered, fishing and talking. I was small and young, and sometimes the men seemed scary, but once I was given a can of soda from a plastic chest full of ice. I used to be able to close my eyes and tell which end of the pier I was on, the one out in the water or the one close by the cabins, by whether I could smell the mud and grass. I was only there two weeks a year, and only for four summers, but they were the biggest days in my life.

When I was too old for baths and I began taking showers, I was suddenly back on that pier when the steam closed around me. By then I was old enough to know why Dad didn’t talk about the cabin. He didn’t talk about it but I think he missed it. He was at work a lot more and we left the house where I grew up and moved into an apartment. I lost a lot of friends when we moved and went to a new school where I didn’t know anybody.

I was allowed to buy school lunch for cheaper than the other kids because Dad knew the superintendent. I believed that until I saw that the poor kids all got the same discount. Mom found me out one morning as she gave me fifty cents and she was pierced by a look she saw on my face. I don’t know what look it was, only that it conveyed my hatred of the lie and not the tremendous love I had for her.

When I was playing in a neighbor’s yard, jumping through the spray of sprinklers that jutted up and kicked on like magic, I was lectured about property lines and that I was not to cross them without permission. The lecture was not what gave me a lasting unease, but rather the realization that I had been looking at things backward. Driveways are built along with the house, so really the road goes straight and driveways come off it like branches on a tree. They are not parts of the road pre-planned to end right where houses sprout up.

I did not know that our old house, like our cabin on the lake, was not ours forever. I had never seen the whole cycle and the realization was like looking up at night to find the full moon waning away. Every life is a branch on a road and we are all looking for a place. Whatever we find is not always perfect, but sometimes it works, at least for a while. I had a hard time grasping the complete lack of certainty.

In that memory I watch from the pier and I envy the people out on the lake. The boats come and go because the pier was there first, not the other way around. They have found their place and a happiness with it, in my mind a constant, permanent thing. They take their poles and climb onto the pier, leaving the boat for others, and nothing should have been more plain to me: they were like people leaving their houses so other families could move in, except the whole exchange of years happens in a moment, all wreathed in fog as I stand barefoot, watching.