Beginning to piece I'm working on now

For the last seven years, my father and I have kayaked the thirty-six mile Wild and Scenic portion of the Rogue River each August. The trip is part father-son bonding experience, part test of physical capacity, especially in the last five years, as my father has reached his mid-sixties and his arms, once corded with muscle, have begun to betray him with the inevitable frailty of age. He has come full circle: when my father was fifteen and a hundred pounds soaking wet, he signed on to a Rogue Whitewater guide for a summer as a pot-boy, weak and pale with lazy adolescence; two summers later, he was a seasoned young boatsman, muscle thick across his tanned shoulders, and he’d learned to read a rapids for the safest path, to make his own choices free of the direction of an older boatsman. He grew up on the river, beyond the judgment of his domineering father, learned how to survive in a dangerous world.
Since I was thirteen, I have been down the Rogue a dozen times. We run the river each year in an inflatable two-man kayak, him reading the water and me at his direction, the muscle to drive an overburdened boat through the world-class whitewater. For him, it's freeing to have only the immediate danger of the water and his own judgment of the way through, the river pounding through the slick-rock canyon with such velocity and force as if to make indisputable nature’s dominion over man. The glory of river is as close to religion as my father comes, and it is as close to my father as I allow myself to be-- I do what he says without comment, do not question his decisions. On the river, what is between us is less important than what courses under us: we are in the same boat, subject to the same danger, and we must arrive together or be upended together: divergence is impossible.

Last year, he kept asking me to call the path. “Should we cut in by the big rock, inside there?” he’d say, and actually pause and wait for my answer. “Or would it be better to the chute on the outside?”

I’d grimace behind him in the boat, clear my throat. “Can’t see without my glasses,” I said, which was not really true. “You call it.”

“Someday, you’ll need to be able to make these decisions yourself,” he said after the fourth or fifth time he’d solicited my opinion.

“Sure,” I said. As if I was going to ruin the river with the possibility of criticism-- choosing the wrong route, misreading the current, overlooking a hazard was all too easy. I knew it full well from the rest of my life, which my father had qualified opinions on, his actual judgment clear in his carefully chosen words. When he noted my bachelorhood given my younger brother’s wife, children, mortgage, business, I knew when he said, “When you find the right woman and change your circumstances and commit,” that he meant I’d better find a woman unconcerned with my choice of writerly poverty and find a way to make a life more financially stable than adjuncting to steal time to write uncommercial work, that I’d have to leave off the frivolity of nights shooting pool at the bar, do better than my tiny, cheaply furnished apartment with more books than shelves, that he still couldn’t understand why I hadn’t married my high school sweetheart whose parents he and my mother still have monthly dinner parties with. When he said, “Congratulations on the fellowship,” or, “Nice work placing that piece,” it was with such reserve that he might has well have said, “You know that’s small money and small success, and still doesn’t mean anyone wants to buy your novel.”

I can run the Rogue on my own, though not as well as my father—I would likely make a mistake or two, but I would never miss the fishladder at Rainie Falls or fail to start river left and cut left with the eddy behind the canoe-shaped rock at Blossom Bar. On the Rogue with my father, I have no desire to demonstrate this capacity and so be capable of error. The river is no place for argument.

The Difference Between AWP and The University

It has come to my attention, this morning as I struggle to reorient, that the primary difference between the AWP conference and teaching at the University is that because I have actual responsibility here, I can't blow off what I should be doing and go drink bourbon instead.

But that is not precisely right. Because AWP consists largely of writers, established and aspiring, and here at the University of Oregon I teach mostly college students, and so the main difference I encounter is really that eighteen-year-old college students are more pleasant, more thoughtful, and drink considerably more. I do not mean to imply that there was a lack of drunken debauchery, because that would be a lie, and of course, I don't engage in drunken debauchery with college students, at least not those under twenty-one (and if I did, I would not admit it on the interweb). But I suppose one of the things I most took away from the conference this year was a marked distaste for the sort of activity that occurs at AWP.

Here's what I mean: take the panels. I only attended a few. Some of the panelists were knockout, but often, what I most took away in the end were the unending comments from the wings, where people would ask self-important questions they'd scribbled on little notepads, or make 'comments' that were really their own personal platforms or were meant to aggrandize them, or-- and this was my own favorite-- they would actually SUMMARIZE the panelist's own presentation back to them to show they understood.

And there was the large hunger, everywhere. And the lack of whatever it is people believe will sustain them-- publishers, publicity, recognition. Too many voices and not enough microphones; too many egos and not enough ego-boosters; and of course, there was the intensity and scrum of it, the flow and ebb of bodies bound for readings, panels, parties. The scrum of it. And as I guess I tend to do everywhere, even among writers I mostly stood back watching writers talk about writing, drink about their own writing, try to get laid to forget their bad writing or celebrate their good. Some of that was my fault, but I guess I have, finally, too few 'ins', too few friends who could afford such a long trip.

I still had a good time, and as I anticipated, I was pleased too to see so many people who care about writing and literature in one place. And I did see some good friends, and make a few good new ones, most notably the lovely editors of Gulf Coast where I have an essay forthcoming-- they were so kind and welcoming, so glad to speak to me about jobs and the experience at the University of Houston that it made up for the obnoxious interactions that occurred some elsewheres. I had a great conversation with Thomas Williams, who published my first story back when he was editor of The Arkansas Review and who has a novella forthcoming-- with him, we talking about how to keep integrity given ambition and all the pressures to accomodate to commerical pressures and outside influence. Beyond those fine folks, I mostly hung out with some non-writer friends in from New York, and some friends who live and work in D.C., and all of it was fine. DC is a beautiful, bustling city, but I don't think it's my style.

Not that Eugene is, either, but even so, I wasn't unhappy to make it home.

Immanence

Tonight I cannot sleep for the distances and spaces, the isolation, today the fever of wanting, or of affliction (what is the difference?), the certainty of failure, the large expanse of night when I ponder such things and can't sleep, and I am aware that these are finally ephemera. There's a line that Ann Beattie uses in a short story, this great big move in this small subtle story about an old man who is generous enough to support the lives of his whole family-- his wife and grandchildren and all they do and try to do-- but who wants something that is his alone: a part of him that is personal, beautiful, essential only to him. And in trying to explain his need, he says: "Imagine a day at the end of your life."

And I can-- I can picture myself, surrounded perhaps by those who have lasted and I hope those I've loved, still love, my youthful foolishness and desire and ambition muted but perhaps adequately realized to give me a sense of a life that has had some importance and scale, can see how I will regard all the harm I did myself in self-judgment, self-imposed isolation, uncourageous boozing, willful refusal to stand on any terms that are not my own, which will seem finally less necessity than solipsism indulged with a terrible price. What would that older man, that mellowed and wiser self say, looking back? I know already what I will regret-- the arrogance, the silent endurance of the unendurable, the children I imagined I could save and so harmed in trying, the people I couldn't tell the truth to and so hurt, the love I couldn't stand for and so may lose forever, the bleary evenings of my mid-twenties when I imagined liquored heights could lift you instead of leave you to the fall, the women I tried to save instead of love, the love I couldn't feel, the losses I couldn't face, the excuses I made-- and none of it tells me how to live now. I have been like this since I was seven years old, and used to lie in the upper bunk hearing my brother snore, safe in sleep, while the hard ticking of the clock assaulted my ears and the darkness turned and turned about me and I lay thinking about how the reason I couldn't sleep was exactly the fact of not being asleep, that I dreaded waiting, and too recognized that one day I would think back on how I couldn't sleep for fear of never falling asleep and remember that I knew it was a foolish reason for insomnia, knew that someday I’d look back on it and even recognizing the immature foolishness of those nights awake, I'd remember too how I'd already recognized then that one day I'd see it differently, and if I’d grown up to be a decent man who hadn’t forgotten what it was to be a child alone with his fears, I would wish I could go back to that boy so alone in the night and offer him solace, or at least the comfort of knowing that the duration would end, the sun would come up, and one day he would move beyond such sad and lonely thoughts.

Of course, I had it right then: I would want to go to that boy and tell him such a thing, but I would not be able to. And even now, I too often cannot sleep, and muse late, late into the night.