My Father, the Storm

part of a longer piece. I just can't right now. It comes little by little bled onto the keyboard. 

My father gave me a love of the outdoors and a healthy respect for the terrifying beauty of nature. He had a keen ability to find teachable moments in the wild. 

He gave me one of the hardest lessons of my life. We had an inflatable pool on the back deck, one day he came out and saw a baby squirrel hopped in and could not grip the side of the pool to get out. Instead of taking care of it discreetly, he called my brother and I over. We looked at the lifeless body floating. At the time I hated him for this. I didn’t want to look at the tiny waterlogged body. The squirrel was so young, his belly still translucent we could see where the umbilical cord had attached.

               “This is why you never go swimming alone.” My father said.

               I never did.

My father’s gifts included a second sight about storms. Once at Cedar Point he looked at the shift in clouds above the theme park and said we’d better head indoors. We walked to the marina and into a restaurant for mountainous stack of ribs. Sure enough as dinner arrived the sky opened and poured down around us. The line to the restaurant spanned around the corner into the storm while we munched happily in our corner until the storm subsided.

 He died too young. He had so much to teach me about the outdoors. To teach the children I have yet to conceive about storms. I pack now for a camping trip thinking about my father, what a way to honor him then to camp out before Father’s Day. I pack a tent, sleeping pad, my first camping stove and I’m filled with an ache for my father.

I look at the pictures of us camping, he took such tiny children tent camping in the wilds of Canada. Okay, to a provincial park in Sarnia. For very young children it seemed like wilderness and the raccoons could be quite cunning at breaking into our food. Lake Ontario threatened to swallow us whole. Fire pits could have consumed us. We trapped chipmunks in a Pyrex bowl baited with nuts and propped up with a twig tied with string. We always let them go immediately. We just wanted to catch them. We had a wild and free childhood.  I would always keep one sweatshirt out of the wash for as long as possible because it smelled like campfire.

 My father took us on nature walks even when we weren’t camping, through the ravine around Oakland University. My brother called it “the great valley” from the Land Before Time. We spent afternoons just walking and telling stories. Finite stories. I wish now I had more of them. My father could spin a good tale either about something he read in college or a movie. He made it age appropriate. I couldn’t believe the violence in the Godfather when I actually saw it. My father’s story, stripped of sex and violence was about family. A patriarch providing for his family the best he could.

 We played work games like subjection-junction, a game where you try to make the longest sentence using the subjective tense, like “he will have had had a sandwich.” Once he taught me the Greek alphabet. My father was a kinetic teacher. We learned by observing, by testing limits. He let my brother turn our old swing set into a lightning rod. We then forgot about the lighting rod, and well, let’s just say it worked as designed.

 I miss him.  My father was a great man. He wasn’t always a good man, but he was a great man. He saw the world in a different way from the people around him, noticed the color of the light and shifts in clouds. Let his children explore and learn. There will never be another man like him. I miss the stubborn bastard, the man who refused to become a burden to his children when we never thought of him that way. A man who could never admit to being wrong, no matter what it cost him. My father was a storm in his own right.

 As I gather my gear for camping I think of him. My first teacher and storyteller. I think of the storm that was my father.