Skimming at Bass Lake

I'm three years old and waste deep in the murky waters of Bass Lake. I've been crying for a while, my fingers are spread wide but my arms droop from heaviness. My mother stands beside my father on shore. He's the one who takes this iconic picture of my childhood. It's an awkward and embarrassing photo.

The camera clicks and my mother reenters the lake, wrapping me in one of the line-stiffened towels that announce the arrival of spring in our household. I spend the remainder of the afternoon digging with sticks, inches from the water, contentedly safe and engaged in my task.

My father wasn't the kind of man who'd make his child cry to get a picture. He practiced the art of peacekeeping the way he practiced photography. He knew when to give in though. My mother had invested too much in the trip and was determined to make it meaningful. Packing grocery sacks with picnic supplies, filling the gas tank, and driving until we found the perfect spot along the Bass Lake shoreline, away from the crowds, my mother wanted to take home a picture perfect photo to commemorate the day.

It was a two-front battle my mother fought: getting me in the lake and battling my father over the camera. She'd go through the packages of photos he'd bring home from the drug store, her face reddening each time. Rustic scenes and wildflowers were little more than rubbish to a woman who returned pop bottles and collected coupons from other people's newspapers. Each photo shoot she orchestrated skimmed a bit from the photos my father was drawn to take. He preserved his life in pictures the way poets capture sensory experiences on paper.

The job he worked provided just the basics for the family but his photography illuminated the spectacular he found in his ordinary life: the milkweed flowers, a dilapidated barn door. His pictures became for him a private treasure only he could interpret. There's definitely a joy in that.

I'm drawn to ordinary beauty just like my father. Give me a William Carlos Williams, Robert Frost or Theodore Rothke poem and my mind revels in the spectacular these artists are able to create with their finely crafted words. My favorite words, from Theodore Rothke's "The Root Cellar," are written in my best cursive handwriting on my office wall: "Bulbs broke out of boxes hunting for chinks in the dark,/Shoots dangled and drooped,/Lolling obscenely from the mildewed crates . . . ."

The visual and linguistic cacophony in this poem is breath-taking.  The way the bulbs break free and entangle themselves, branch out and thrive despite their limited resources, despite their cramped assignment! The way the words stumble on your tongue when you read it aloud. It takes just the slightest gleam of light to give the roots and bulbs the ability to grow. That's a message I'm compelled to share.

I read this poem very much on purpose each year with my students. I figure that if bulbs can break free so can they. They don't know it yet so I let Theodore Rothke teach them. By the third reading of this short poem, they gain clarity in Rothke's final words: "Nothing would give up life:/Even the dirt kept breathing a small breath."  They begin to breathe a little more purposefully as well.

So do I.

The photo at the lake that day, yellowed with age now along the white cropped edges, no longer jeers at me. I'm happiest on the shore, and that's okay with me.