Like the Silver Bellies of Salmon

We would rise up, dripping and goosebumped, lifting ourselves onto the rocks.

Hello Beautifuls!

Thank you for all of the birthday wishes! I am back from vacationing and am feeling refreshed and ready to dive back in to work and writing.

Welcome to all the new subscribers. I am thrilled you are here. No matter when you joined, your love and support mean the world to me. 🙏

A big thank you to

TheUltraContemplative

and

Diana Strinati Baur

, other Substack writers who have recommended my work to their people.

*WITD members, please feel free to do a close read and leave any thoughts or comments for me below! xoxox

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Me at one of my dad’s and my favorite swimming holes on the Clark Fork of the Stanislaus River, August, 1994.

I was six when I fell in love with water. The mild terror and thrill of floating down a clear river, bouncing off rocks, tumbling gently down chutes between towering granite boulders, inner tubing down the rivers of the Sierra Nevada mountains. Our Dad (a Missouri boy who was winging it), taught us to let the water numb the V of our bodies as they folded into the the centers of the inflated rubber rings, down our lower backs, through our hips and half way up our thighs. With knees and arms and legs exposed to the blue sky and sun, the freezing was bearable, and worth it.

My sister and I would dare each other to get all the way in, first our calves, then our hips, then the tender skin under our arms, and finally in a flash of held breath, our heads. We rose up, dripping and goosebumped, lifting ourselves onto the rocks. Still standing, we curved our bodies over themselves to fling our hair back and forth between our knees, throwing off water droplets through the ends of the long, clumped strands. After, we spread out our hair and sunned ourselves on a flat spot, the hot granite sizzling against our skin, our wet bathing suits turning the soft tissue in between our thighs a watery white, like the silver bellies of salmon.

Those summers smelled like dirt and dry pine needles, sap covered bark and pine cones, mountain sage and possibility.

My dad bought a house in those mountains when I was 17 and he moved up there full time when I was 21. Spring break, summers, long weekends from May through October, we would leave his house early, just the two of us, get in his old Bronco and head out on a curvy mountain road to a spot in the river he'd discovered and wanted to show me. These places were always less traveled paths, we both sought quiet in nature, not other people besides ourselves. We could spend an entire afternoon with little verbal communication, but instead communion, with each other, with the river, with the rocks and the trees. 

When my dad sold his house in my early 40s, nearly a decade ago, I felt lost. His was the last house still in my life that I knew as a child, the only place I could still think of as going home. I remember the drive up the final big hill, a long straight stretch of mountain highway, then a steep thousand-foot ride up the switchbacks past the patch of wild blackberries where, one time in my twenties, we picked bucketsful for a Thanksgiving pie. His house perched itself on the side of the hill, looking out over the mountain ranges to the west, like endless waves rolling in, sunsets orange and purple and fuchsia pink.

When he left, we left behind those roads, those rivers, our communion.

He sold his mountain house but kept the adjacent empty lot, and a year or two later I asked if I could buy it. He said, "No, you don't want that piece of property, it's not worth anything, can't build on it, no water." But I didn't want the property to build on, I wanted the property as a place to remember, a place to mark my childhood with an X, like buried treasure. 

After my first marriage ended, I met a man, crazy with his own ideas of changing the world, in love with himself, and also with Lake Tahoe. His grandfather built a house there in the 1950s, on the southeast shore of the lake just a few steps up the hillside from the beach. As a child I knew of Lake Tahoe, but we rarely visited. Our place was by the river.

That man and I liked to visit that old lake house in the late summer, after the crowds, before the first snow, when the light was less bright and the wind reminded me I was still breathing. Wrapped in a wool cardigan, I would sit on the narrow beach and watch the lake change colors as the sun moved across the sky, turning it from deep navy and turquoise to blue-silver in the evening light. I burrowed my sitting bones into the sand, pressing my shoulder blades into the corner of the rock wall built decades before I was born, protecting myself from the wind. 

I collected rocks shaped like hearts, and wondered how to piece together my life. 

For several years the man with the crazy ideas and I got along well enough, and then we didn’t. I cried as I left the lake house house for the last time, but before I went, I buried a feather deep, deep, deep in the sand. To mark that I had been there, and that I loved it. 

Last year, my now husband and I rented a house just up the hill from the 1950s lake house. I no longer knew how to find the rivers of my childhood, but the lake, I knew how to get there. 

We discovered a map, in a guidebook left on a bookshelf of our rented house, of a fire road off Highway 50 where it skirts the lake, marked by a closed green metal gate in the shape of a bike flag, a sideways triangle, pointed on one end, flat on the other. It felt like the roads my dad and I used to look for, less traveled, more secret. Now Husband and I hiked down, down, down the road to three small coves with glass-like water the colors of a Caribbean sea. We had them all to ourselves and the lake called out to me, "Dare yourself to get in, past your calves, your belly, the tender skin under your arms. Dip your head under water and let me tell you stories older than God."  I swam all day and after, I laid my limbs out on her granite beaches, an offering.

I don't see my dad so much anymore. He is quiet and set in his ways, he likes his space as much inside now as he did outside when I was young. But I visited him recently and asked if he would show me on the map where we used to play on the rivers. An engineer by trade, he copied his maps, highlighted the roads, marked X on the places we used to get in. We sat at his desk for hours pouring over the maps, remembering summers at his house, our favorite places to get in the river, the time we took a three-mile ride in the innertubes, my mother picking us up at the end. 

He said to me, "You have to get out here, right here," His finger tapped the map, "Before the bridge. If you go under the bridge, you go over the falls. But," he smiled, "If you get out here, you're safe." 

I asked if he missed living in the mountains. He took a minute to reply and said, "I don't miss the snow, but I miss the rivers, the smell, the air. Wouldn't it be fun to go back to one of our spots some day?"

I looked at him, white hair still full, thin body even thinner, his frame stooped more each year, blue eyes a little less focused but still sharp, and then put my finger on  the map. "We could stay here in Arnold, then drive out to the bridge, walk down the trail and maybe sit on a rock. Have a picnic."

He smiled again, nodded his head, looking hopefully at me, and I recognized my foolishness then. I didn't have to own a piece of land to come back home.

Me in Lake Tahoe, on my 51st birthday, May 30, 2024.

Hello Beautifuls is getting more juicy all the time. The beautiful readers here are building a community of people who are kind, compassionate, generous and loving. I hope you’ll join us by subscribing.

Did you know that if you ❤️ this post, more people will see it and know about my work?

If you’re new here, a thing happened just before my birthday, the incredible Jeannine Ouellette published an essay of mine on her substack. This piece resonated with people and it’s a beautiful example of what a writer can do with a loving and vulnerable teacher/editor and a safe community in which to share and grow.

*WITD is short for

Writing in the Dark with Jeannine Ouellette

, the Substack by the inimitable

Jeannine Ouellette

, mentioned above. This is where my essay was published, and this is where Jeannine invites us into her world and guides us to be more in touch with ourselves and our writing. If you’re interested in writing, for any reason, please check her out. She is loving, generous, a fantastic teacher, and an incredible writer.

Me and my dad at his house in the mountains, 2005.

If you’re interested in the craft behind the writing, this is for you. If you don’t want to see behind the curtain this is your spoiler alert. ❤️

Writing this essay, getting it to this place, took hours and hours and probably 15 or 20 drafts. I threw out hundreds of words. I threw out almost the entire first essay that I was ready to publish just to be done with the thing. But Jeannine has taught me to stick with the writing. To ask my body (not just my mind) what the story is. As she so wisely said, “The body holds the stories, the mind just chatters about them.”

I tried to get out of my mind and into my body and write about how things felt, not just my story about how things were or weren’t. The first version had very little about my dad and a lot about water in all the various forms I’ve experienced it. I will likely use some of those paragraphs or a piece of them, somewhere else. Or maybe I won’t. I try to see all those unused words as stones in the road that got the piece where it is now.

I asked my husband to read the first draft that I thought was finished enough. He said he didn’t really know what the piece was about, other than water. Then the next draft, which really means hours and hours of revision and five drafts later, he said it was better, but that he still wasn’t sure what the story was. I cut more, I rewrote more, I wrote new words and let it sit, then did it all again. Two days after that, I handed him another draft, having lost count by now and utterly frustrated with the piece. He retuned it and said he wasn’t sure why the maps were so important to me. Arrgggg! (Not arg at him, arg at the piece. His feedback skills are invaluable to me.) So I wrote more. Things I didn’t think were important, or things I didn’t think I wanted to write about. And then I handed him more or less the version you see here.

They say writing is rewriting and they’re not kidding.

Joan Didion once said in an interview about her book Blue Nights, “Didion described Blue Nights as a challenge that she was not certain she could complete. At one point, when she considered quitting the project, her agent played a pivotal role:

‘I did not in fact think I could finish this last book, and when I say that people usually assume because it’s a very sensitive subject, that I couldn’t finish it because it was too painful. Not at all. I didn’t think I could finish it because I didn’t think I was getting it right. I didn’t think I could finish it, period. So I mentioned to my agent, who is Lynn Nesbit, that I didn’t think I could finish this book and I would give the money back to Knopf, and Lynn said why not wait a while?’”

Sometimes we have to sit with a piece. Wait it out, wait our bodies out until they are ready to tell us, and we are ready to listen, to the real story, beyond our minds.

xoxox

j