Woodsmen
By Jon Sindell
Copyright 2009-2012 Jon Sindell
In this woodland tale by the author of The Mighty Roman and Trips `n’ Trials of a Down, Beat Dad, first published in the magazine riverbabble, an estranged father and his fifteen–year–old son take to the woods. Key reference is made to Wordsworth’s Ode: Intimations Of Immortality From Recollections Of Early Childhood.
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Woodsmen
“It was your idea to go camping,” snapped the dad on a winding backroad in search of the campground. He wiped perspiration from heat and embarrassment, braced for the retort.
“No it wasn’t.” The boy’s sour glare darted the man’s chest.
The dad smiled grimly with comprehension that consoled little for his foolish reliance on a sketchy downloaded road map. “Your mother said you wanted to go camping.”
“She was wrong,” son declared as if flicking a gnat.
Years before, with a plastic bat fresh from Toys R Us, the boy had swatted ball after ball while his dad “attaboy!–ed” at the machinelike consistency of his son: fifteen now, he still murdered the fat ones. His set his chin on a grasshopper knee, gazed at the sunlight that strobed through the redwoods.
“No she wasn’t wrong,” the dad brayed. “I said, ‘What’s Danny into these days?,’ and she said, `Camping, the boy loves the outdoors.’ So we’re camping.’”
“We are?” the boy chortled as they rounded yet another shady bend.
“Yes,” the dad crowed. “There’s the sign, behind that huge redwood. Nice job they did of hiding it, no?” He looked over. “Congrats, Danny, you’ve perfected your smirk.”
“It’s Daniel now. No one calls me Danny.”
“Daniel,” said the father, wincing as if tasting dust in his mouth. “These trees are hundreds of years old ... Daniel. Some are over a thousand, maybe.”
Beneath the tires, gravel crunched and twigs snapped. On each side giant redwoods peered down at a father and son going thankfully silent. The dad slowed the car to take in the scene, and mentioned the one other camping trip they had taken. In wonder he squinted up at the trees. “Coast redwoods: sequoia sempervirens.”
“Latin. Wow.”
“Yeah, Latin, wow. I sure wowed `em at the bowling alley with my Latin. Gutter ballus. Hey, remember taking batting practice with Hal and Fat Morris? You’d chase balls for hours, then we’d let you hit? Danny? Man, take that damn thing out of your ear!”
“It’s an earbud for my iPod, and I’m not ignoring you because of an iPod.” The boy glared a bull’s–eye at a freckle beneath eyes as intense and demanding as they always had been, but thrillingly vulnerable now, too.
The dad’s beset gaze appealed to the treetops. “What a spot this is. I reserved it five months ago, and I’m glad I did. Planning ahead, that’s the key, Danny Boy.”
“That’s you, Keith Man.”
“Keith, Danny?”
“Danny.’ ” The boy’s murmur fell just below the dad’s sonar. The dad crunched to a stop at the campsite against a roughhewn timber, cut the engine, clamped the wheel, gritted his teeth and stared at the dash. “Look, Danny—Daniel—you’re not calling—this guy your mom married—”
“Tom?”
“Yeah. You’re not calling—”
Daniel stretched a flat smile and glanced at his father. When had the harsh white crept into his beard? When had the eyes darkened? When had the man shrunk? With a smile that asserted some secret higher knowledge, the boy slipped the earbud into the ear that was away from his dad and dialed up the volume, then stepped out into the simmering heat. He measured nearly six–feet–tall when giraffing his neck against the door jamb at his mom’s house, and like a sapling he full–faced the sky, closing his eyes to allow the sun’s warmth to saturate his face and radiate out to his ears and down his neck, his smile blossoming in the light. The dad approached from the rear to ask for help unloading the truck, but the boy, unaware, pressed his palms together and shot long arms upward, then separated them in controlled slow–mo like clock-hands sweeping in opposite directions. The O formed by his father’s mouth uttered no reproach, and the man watched in wonder as his son communed with the woods via yoga forms that reached for the sky, waved the clouds, drew wood–sprites from hiding in the tall ferns of a nearby grove and in the high branches of the redwoods themselves. Then the boy, still a novice, crooked a leg to nearly horizontal as his twenty–one–year–old stepbrother had taught him, lost his balance, and staggered.
“I don’t think I could do that,” the dad chuckled. “Not the falling, I mean, the other.”
The boy grimaced at the mention of the stumble, and his dad resumed unloading alone. The man spread the new tent flat on the ground and scattered stakes at the corners. The boy ambled up. “Good spot,” said the dad as if allowing his son to listen in on adult conversation. “Nice flat ground, pretty smooth, and a view of the fire ring in case we get bored.”
“Sure,” the boy mumbled. “’s fine.”
Encouraged by his son’s approval, the father turned to him. “It takes four hands to build this thing, D. Good thing you’re such a tall son of a gun, you can hold up the center while I bend the poles. How’d you get so tall anyway?” The dad reached for his son’s cheek to pinch, but the boy jerked away and twisted a smirk of pained discomfiture and aversion, just as his father had feared he would. The boy grew conscious of the picture–postcard families and happy late–teen couples in nearby campsites and avoided looking at them lest they notice him: there, in his skin, on the earth, with his dad.
The combined weight of the boy’s silence, the sky, and the redwoods overwhelmed the father, who directed his son with commando–like gestures as if speech might be fatal. They inserted thin fiberglass poles into tent sleeves and crossed the first two in the center. Then the son, at his father’s terse command, held the two poles in place like a gangly Atlas as his dad forced the last two poles into their sleeves. They raised the tent and it held its form well, and the man congratulated himself for rehearsing the procedure at home as he ceremoniously pounded the last stake. “Nice job, Dano. Care to go for a hike?”
The boy thought it over. “I think I just want to chill a while. Soak up the—you know—”
“Atmosphere?” the dad said with a pointed grin. “How’s English class coming, anyway?”
The boy jerked his head away in annoyance and swung a camp chair into the shade at the edge of the campground. He angled the chair away from the tent and his father, inserted his earbuds and dialed his iPod. The dad looked around as if seeking a witness to his son’s disrespect, but the other campers were encased in private bubbles of gladness that seemed as remote as if glimpsed through the wrong end of a telescope. The dad grabbed the other camp chair, set it a few feet from his son’s—the ex–wife had advised him that giving the boy space was crucial—and patted the brand new volume of nature poetry he had purchased especially for the occasion.
One hour later he turned and declared: “This poetry’s great.”
The boy ignored the hint, so the dad pulled his chair closer and tapped his son’s arm. The boy pulled out an earbud and directed his gaze along a tangent passing by his dad’s face.
“This Wordsworth guy, Danny, listen: `There was a time when meadow, grove and
stream ... dot dot dot ... the glory and the freshness of a dream!’ I love that line! It’s like that out
here now, isn’t it Danny? So fresh and clean? It’s nothing like this in the city, is it?”
The boy smiled sourly as if caught unprepared by a pop quiz.
“Danny, do you even study in school?”
The son’s face twisted with pain; the dad chastised himself. “I mean,” he softened, “poetry is great stuff, son. You really should give it a chance, you know?”
The boy sat as impassively as he had years before when his cloud was about to burst. The dad remembered the sign, popped open a beer and jammed his head down into his shoulders, upset with himself and dismayed by his seed.
They sat silent for hours: iPod and texting on the right, restless reading and journaling on the left, the dad’s journal entries staccato bursts following glances at his silent son. The shade of night fell cool and sweet and mosquitos lighted, and the dad swiftly produced a can of mosquito spray from an overstuffed box of camping supplies he had purchased that week. He sprayed his wrists and rubbed them together, then reached a damp wrist towards his son’s neck and pressed it against skin as honeyed in hue as pastry crust and sweet smelling from the sun’s warmth and a glaze of dried sweat. The son jumped at his father’s cold touch on his skin, looked testily at him, and was stunned by the swirl of emotions he found in the man’s face—pain among them.
“Sorry, but you startled me,” the boy said. “But—thanks