Snapshots from an Unplanned Writing Hiatus
An accounting of the expected and unexpected events that have kept me away from my writing desk.
1.
I’m nearly flat on my back, bright lights bearing down on me, the small, Asian root canal specialist grinding serpentine pathways up the center of my infected tooth. At one point I open my eyes to see a tiny, ridged length of wire gripped between his fingers before he pushes it up into the tunnels he has made and commences to scrape. While there is no pain, the sensation is overwhelmingly strange and disturbing—to hear the noise it makes, feel the vibrations reverberating through my jawbone. A few days later, I’m at my regular dentist’s, again numbed up and flat on my back, again feeling the grinding of drills, smelling what smells like smoke but he tells me is dust (tooth dust?!), as he preps my root-canaled tooth for an obscenely expensive cap—one my dental insurance would have at least partially covered had I not spent all of my yearly allotted money on the root canal. I have even contacted a dentist friend in Mexico who tells me he could have done the cap for half the cost, and I could have saved a few hundred bucks even after airfare, but ultimately decided it wasn’t worth it….
2.
May rains have come hard this year, and my basement that flooded repeatedly last winter—something I had attributed to the partially frozen ground—is filled with several inches of water, much more even than I had seen before. So I’m down there in fishing waders with two submersible pumps running hard, trying to keep pace with the water that is still seeping up from below the foundation everywhere. As with my bad tooth, it’s decided that major surgery will be required—especially if we ever want to sell the house. So, for the cost of about 15 major tooth repairs, we now have a local waterproofing father and son team and their crew of lanky, hardworking, Patois-speaking Jamaicans jack hammering channels (not unlike the channels ground into the heart of my tooth), hauling out 5 gallon bucket after 5 gallon bucket of rubble, hauling in pail upon pail of drainage stone. A sump pump with a battery backup system and a perimeter of perforated PVC covered in stone and concrete will now guarantee me a dry basement “for life.” And while retirement may now have to be pushed back further still, at least my wife and I will no longer panic every time another global-warming-fueled storm rolls in….
3.
I make the short but always white-knuckled drive into New York City, merging from one parkway onto another, finally careening down the Henry Hudson along the mighty Hudson River, West-Village-bound to help my daughter, Sofia, move most of her belongings into storage, the remainder crammed into every nook and cranny of my Subaru Outback. An obscene rent increase on an already obscene rent have brought her to making the decision to live with us for awhile and look for something cheaper—possibly across the East River, in Brooklyn, Williamsburg—to just train-in to her job on office days. I’m lucky to find some double parking in front of a dumpster right in front of her building, and soon we are schlepping bags of clothes, a small desk, television…down too many flights of narrow, slick-marble stairs, looking both ways to avoid men moving far too fast on strange, electric unicycles, cyclists, cars, trucks. Soon the Subaru is packed full, and we even find the time before the movers arrive to grab a few slices of pizza from the exceptional pizzeria across the street (slices that satisfy even this New Haven, CT and backyard pizza oven constructor’s snobbish, “apizza” palette ). The movers are not actual movers, just two Russians with a Sprinter Van and a 5-star rating on Taskrabbit. They will move the remainder—bed, winter clothes, large mirrors, pictures…to a storage facility in Brooklyn. They jump right in, working hard, and in no time, everything is gone from her room. Before they leave to meet us at the storage facility, the man who speaks better English looks hard in my direction, smiles at me and says, “Like John Malkovich, just like him,” gesturing toward me. “Red, like in movie, Red!”
After everything is tucked away into the 5x8 cubicle in a towering building of innumerable 5x8 cubicles, complete with climate control and a bit too loud elevator music falling from tinny speakers, we are walking through the streets of nearby Williamsburg, Sofia, pointing to places she and her boyfriend have been, walking down a street that closes to vehicle traffic every evening at 5PM and on weekends, walking through the lovely Marsha P. Johnson park, named for a transgender woman of color and pioneer of the LGBTQ rights movement that runs along the East River. It is a lovely 70-degree spring day. We come to a small sand beach, piers jutting out into the river, people everywhere, dogs, children playing in the sand, fishermen carefully watching their lines angling out into the strong currents, ferries backing up, spinning round and heading toward Manhattan whose sky line is a glimmering backdrop to it all. Sofia insists we stop to watch the dogs in an artificial turf, free-play area. Some run in circles, chasing nothing at all. One chases a lacrosse ball a man tosses for him dodging other dogs who nip at him and the legs of dog owners on his endless game of fetch. An older retriever mix stands mesmerized in the direct center of things. Two small terriers take turns chasing each other….Sofia says, “I just love watching them.”She also points out small children, “little nuggets,” one a stylish city boy wearing his baseball hat backwards, his mother imploring him to move along. And I am continually struck by my own children’s steady march from the era of meandering toddler to full-on adult. In North Carolina recently with her older brother, I felt this self same thing. Then it dawns on me just how moved I am by the genuine delight and deep-felt joy Sofia gleans from pets, small children—that joy an echo of something pure that runs deep in her as well.
4.
I spend still more time with Sofia driving northward from the bustling frenzy of a sunny city spring to the overcast drizzle and utter quietude of the Adirondack mountains. This spring she will be the one to help me open the cabin: re-install solar batteries, put in the aluminum docs, haul the 9.9hp motor down and secure to the boat…. Soon after we arrive and flip the boat right side up and load up, it becomes clear that the 2hp motor—the small, “trustworthy” 4-stroke I bring for the first and last trips of the season—isn’t going to start. We take turns at the oars, and while I’m terribly annoyed (and perhaps there is nothing more frustrating than pulling on that cord, hearing the engine begin to catch, sputter, then go out), the good news is that the black flies haven’t yet arrived and the lake is flat calm and lovely and unchanged, the so-familiar line of small mountains and hills encircling us.
Once across we get to work, hauling things up the trail to the cabin. When I was last here, everything was buried under heavy snow, and you still feel the absence of the snow by the heavy-pressed, dead ferns, grasses and leaves of last summer. In the midst of it all, trillium have sprouted everywhere, red and my favorites, the painted tritium, mostly white with streaks of pink, the first colors of the year.
I slip the batteries into place, tighten down the connectors and hear the refrigerator come to life. Soon the whole system is up and running, lights working, outlets live. I replace a water valve I knew was leaky (after I carelessly left it full of water during a hard freeze last fall), turn on the gas, light pilots, brush away piles of deer droppings from the pathways…and we are done, exhausted, and before lighting a big fire to fend off the last of the winter chill from the cabin and cooking a nice meal, we sit lakeside, me nursing a cold IPA, and watch a loon pop up from out of nowhere, the lake perfect-flat-calm. There is no noise save for the chortling of the loon, then its low-loud-mournful call echoes across the lake. We’ll leave the docks till the next day, easing the wheeled, heavy section in first, rolling it out till wheels find the slight trenches dug out in the sandy bottom, then carry in the narrow section that connects it to shore, walk it awkwardly forward, aligning slots, slipping in big cotter pins and finally leveling the legs….
I do manage one short fishing outing. When all is done that needs to be done, I pull my canoe out from under the cabin, tie on a small, slim streamer fly to mimic a smelt—a minnow that spawns in the lake after ice-out—and set out, paddling slowly, taking great pleasure in finding that so-familiar push-pull rhythm, trolling the fly along behind me, hoping a trout or salmon might find it satisfactory enough to eat. I catch nothing, not even a tap, but a loon surfaces closer to my canoe than I’ve ever seen, and then just floats there, tilting its red eye my way. I dare not move, though after several minutes, I decide to strip in my line and try a cast toward the small creek, assuming this will finally scare it away. But it still doesn’t move and seems to be watching me, curiously intent, bemused. After many casts, it simply eases away, paddling feet invisible beneath the glare of the surface, and I paddle along behind toward my all too temporary cabin home.
5.
My editor at Lyons Press reminds me that a final draft of the manuscript of my book, Two Thirds Water is due, and I feverishly go through each essay, making minor changes, occasionally adding a detail or two, reading passages aloud, putting in commas, removing commas, finding typos…The book will now be released in February of 2026, though there is already a live pre-order link on Amazon.
Such is my accounting for a lack of posts these past few weeks. Here’s to hoping both the expected and unexpected events of these events will find their way into better developed and more focused essays in the future.
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All these (mostly) good things! Congrats on the book.
Love you so much!!