Nature Mystic

Photo by Photoholgic on Unsplash

My Father died about four years ago. He was in his early nineties and had lived a good life. When he died, my reaction was muted. I wasn’t sure why. I cried a little. I missed him, but I seemed to go right on.

Maybe I spent too much time helping others during the time of his death. Helping makes you feel good, but it can be distancing. Perhaps it's just how I move through deep emotions – a little at a time. It's also harder to mourn when thinking, “Good job, Dad! You went out at just the right time and in just the right way.” I was oddly happy for him. He made some good decisions toward the end. He decided on hospice early, opting not to fight his cancer actively. He enjoyed the caregivers that came into the house. It was his good fortune to be able to enjoy his life right up until about two days before he died. Some of this was purely good fortune, but it added up to a ‘good death.’

Whatever the reason, I think about him more and more lately. It’s as if he is just around the corner or right at my shoulder like the good angel in a cartoon.

Dad was a nature mystic, which is what comes back to me now. He didn’t make a big deal about it. For example, Dad would never have called himself a nature mystic. It's just that he paid attention. He had a house by a small suburban lake near the Columbia River Gorge. The Gorge sits between the ocean-influenced Willamette Valley and the inland desert country of Western Oregon and Washington, dominating the weather near it. Sometimes it hisses like a punctured tire with winds created by the pressure differences between the two regions (and a metaphor, too, since the two regions are different in more ways than the weather). 

Dad always knew, literally not figuratively, which way the wind was blowing. Was it going to rain? Don’t check the weather. Just ask Dad.

Our Father introduced us to nature. One of the ways he coped with having six children was to take us camping and skiing. It wore us out, thus cutting down on the fighting, and he loved being outside. We camped with our cousins in the summer and often took a row boat on a trailer – as much to fill it with camping gear for the drive out and back as for fishing. We also skied as a family. Sometimes we whined that we wanted to go to Disneyland. He would look at us with contempt. “Disneyland, we live in Disneyland!” telling us that the kind of life we lived and the adventures we had together were much more satisfying than the Disneyland experience. (Still, I always wanted to go to Disneyland, and I took my children there. We had a great time. Sorry Dad!)

After he retired, he took up bicycling and enjoyed getting mileage awards from the Portland Wheelmen Club (now the Portland Bicycle Club). Fun for my Dad was always outside. He and my mother continued to ski into their late eighties.

In some ways, his athleticism masked how much he was paying attention. As he got older and quieter, he sat daily in his living room, looking out the window at the lake. He watched the wind's direction and force as it played out on the lake's surface. He mapped the movements of the birds, especially the geese. Sometimes I would sit with him on a bright winter afternoon. The sunlight would hit the lake at an angle, and the reflection danced on the water like fairy fractiles. We would sit and watch this light moving across the water. Sometimes I would fall asleep.

This recent bout of thinking about Dad started when I was prepping for my 50th high school reunion. I sat down and leafed through my senior yearbook to remind myself of the members of my class. I figured I might not recognize them (which I didn’t). But as I went through the book, there was a picture of my Dad. He was a math teacher at my high school. I hardly remembered this mild trauma of my youth anymore and was surprised by the picture. He was sitting with all the teachers at a faculty meeting, and what shocked me was how young and handsome he looked in my yearbook. I did the arithmetic and realized he was in his mid-forties. His prime. He was sitting against the back wall, cracking a joke. His face reflects good humor and mild rebellion; after all, it’s a faculty meeting. I am now much older than he was then. 

I walked around in a memory haze for a while after doing the reunion. Then I encountered another set of memories of my Father a few weeks later at a vacation rental in Gold Beach on the Oregon coast. My Father, when retired, used to use his hot tub every morning for an early soak. The tub was outside my parent’s bedroom on a deck looking over the lake. He might be in there as early as 5 am. He would take as long as he wanted. It was his first weather report of the day. 

The Gold Beach rental had a hot tub on the bottom deck looking out on the ocean. I got up early the first morning we were there and put on my swimsuit. I snuck quietly down and pulled the cover off the tub. Steam swirled up along with the spa smell. I climbed in and got comfortable listening to the rumble of the pumps and the ocean waves. The ocean was mild with almost lake-like action against the shore. As I soaked, pelicans flew by, all going in the same direction, south. They often cruised in a line of four birds about a foot above the breaking waves. They were both using the updraft from the ocean and drafting on the bird in front of them. Often they had enough momentum to do nothing, so they glided together down the beach. Then the first bird would flap its wings, and the three in the back of the line would begin to flap and fly with the lead. The formation would get up to speed again and steady itself. Then they would all glide again, still and silent, just above the water. 

Was my Father with me? It felt like it. I didn’t want to turn my head to see. I watched the pelicans fly south in formation instead.