June 10, 2025 | A Friend is Near, Dreams Again, Sails to the North

A hot day bearing down on the land and over the New York hills, with a floating smog coming from Canada—or so they were told—from wildfires far up north past the borders. It stretched down through the valleys, the hills, the mountains, the canals, the towns, the railroads, the cities—everywhere—until it reached the green mountains, where it all stopped, and clean air waited on the other side. On the other side of the docks, a friend of Lyle’s had been taking short steps across the sturdy planks of wood—except for one, which had nearly buckled beneath his foot before he caught himself from falling into the water. And through the bleak skies of grayness—trucking along and ducking—the loons of the point glided past. A big smile spread across Lyle’s face, rising from his throat as he let out a sharp call: “Guppy! Guppy!” he shouted, waving frantically. Guppy turned his head quick, spotted him from far away, and began marching toward him. Lyle, in the meantime, quickly wiped down the countertop, clearing the dirt and grime left from the lunch he’d made earlier. He stepped out of the cabin and stood at the stern of the ship—the highest point—looking out over the water, down toward his friends who were trudging along the shore of the point. Where is he? Where’s his boat? Hey, where’s Lyle? All the talk Lyle had been saying while he was away on his long trip had finally started to come true. And now, to see where he’s been—see him in his boat, on the waters, his life altogether, exactly how he had planned it to go—waiting to share what had come and gone in the last month or so.

Not too long earlier, Lyle had gone into town and purchased a couple of gallons of fuel. He brought it back to the point, made a few slight repairs, and managed to open the old hatch that had been locked shut for many years—got it right on the first try. He filled up the tank, then laid down the rest of his head for an hour or so—until he heard the commotion of a thudding down on the far side of the pier, and now Guppy, his dear friend, had arrived.

Click click click click—crunch, crunch, crunch—he heard.

Click click, crunch, crunch—it was all he heard when the docks were silent.

The docks creaked beneath his long steps and strides until he rounded a corner and bumped into Pat, who was talking to Andrew in front of the old cobblestone building. Once Guppy stepped onto the dock, Lyle climbed up the steps from beneath the cockpit and stood at the top of the stern with a big smile on his face.

“Ay, Guppy! This is your captain—get ready to board!” he called out, excited to see his friend.

Behind Guppy were Polly and Dot, trailing along in their usual cautious manner. They were friendly, shy, and open—especially once Lyle started peppering them with questions about their morning, riding around on an ATV somewhere in the Adirondacks. Guppy had sent Lyle a picture earlier that day of the three of them, covered in dirt, mud, and gunk. All of it had been washed away by now. But the skies were clear, and the blue stretched wide—that was all Lyle could seem to think about. Because despite the brightness of the day, something about it still felt grim to him. It didn’t seem to bother them as much as it did Lyle.

The haze started to worsen from afar, and Lyle wished it would have gone away by the time they showed up. A couple of Jersey-bred hoodlums rolled in to the point only to see a lonesome Lyle filled with an abundance of joy, ruling out the back of the stern, who had been waiting for guests to arrive.

“Does the boat have a name? You have to give it a name,” they asked.

Lyle hesitated before telling them what the name of the boat used to be, but he said it anyway:“The owner called this boat the Squeeze Queen.”

They all laughed and said, “That is the name of the boat.”

Lyle frowned, confused, and said, “There is a better name out there.”

In the two days after their visit, Lyle drove his car past Orwell, down the windy road that took him to another windy road, and then it came to him: the boat does not need a name because it already has one. The Spirit 28 is called the Spirit 28. The boat is the spirit of Lyle’s life and nothing more.

They all boarded the ship after Lyle untied the lifelines, and Guppy stayed off to help as Lyle untied the dock lines, telling Guppy to hold the boat so they could take off. A speedboat passed by, and the waves from its wake rocked the Spirit back and forth until it became worse. Up above, the mast rocked back and forth, nearly touching a long branch that Lyle had nearly broken off some time ago.

Soon, they pushed the Spirit out of the dock and boarded. Lyle got in the captain’s seat with Guppy and the friends up front, put the boat in gear, and they headed off into the long river. It was 2:30 p.m.

They were off and out into the water, heading north where a strong wind blew. That made Lyle very happy because it meant they could raise the sail, float down the river, and talk. Guppy had been itching to swim and told them all to get in once the boat was anchored—then they could swim all afternoon and ride the waves. And once they anchored, their thoughts and talks began.

“Don’t you wish we could go back to how things were?”

The sail was high, and Lyle had just finished laying down the anchor. The boat was still. The friends were in the cockpit, giggling. Lyle and Guppy were in front—after Guppy had climbed the ladder and was drying off from a swim in the lake—and Lyle was deep in thought.

“So, you’re leaving the Mill just as I’m coming back?”

Lyle soon thought this was all unfair—that the life he had dreamed up while sitting there might just be a dream. And what would happen when he went back to the Mill to finish writing his stories, only to realize there was a sequel to his Mill and The River story yet to be written anyway?

Ole Gup spread out on the roof of the Spirit, his legs hanging over the lifelines, started saying things that Lyle could agree with. Lyle began to say his trips across the United States only made sense once they were over.

“I don’t know if you know this, but anytime I’ve been away and come back, it never feels like I left to begin with. And all these stories I’ve seen—hiking, mountain climbing, all this love I have for life—I feel most alive during them. But when it’s all over, all I do is talk about them to anyone. To how things were. For me—and I think you might feel the same—is that when we come to Vermont, we will always find each other again. You, me, and Emmett. It’s part of the grand ole trip.”

The Spirit rocked and swayed. Little splashes of water hit Guppy’s feet as he pulled them back and away. The cool wind soothed the deep and heavy talk of life that Lyle had been thinking about.

Lyle said he would return to the Mill, and that was that. It was dusk. They had been swimming and surfing, listening to each other clamber and talk and be happy.

Lyle gave a one and only warning to his crew: when the sail is raised, the wind will kick the boom one way or the other depending on which way the bow is facing, and it’s best to lay low and stay hidden from the certain hit. Sure enough, once the sail had been half raised, it became more challenging for them to pull it up. Lyle secured the line around the winch, and Guppy tossed him a winch tool to tighten the line so they could raise the sail more. Meanwhile, the two friends were behind the sail, trying to keep it unraveled and untangled, preventing it from pushing back and the boom swinging the other way—knocking Lyle off the boat with it. The boat took a hard left and kept going left, which stunned them. Guppy asked, “Is the boat supposed to be going this way?” Lyle instructed him to turn the boat back to starboard and said, “Hurry, hurry, hurry!” The sail began to kick, and the boom swung the other way, just as Lyle expected.

It’s no surprise that when someone Lyle knows who’s out and about on one of their own experiences and journeys that whenever he crosses his path with someone who is soft to see him while he’s on a journey of his own, he is an array of likes expelling out into the world and this time is no different. He has a friend here and he knows this, and they know this and that’s all this is.

So, Guppy took a dive into the deep water while Lyle and their friends watched. His dive looked more like a flop than a dive, but he tried anyway. One of his friends called out to him as he started swimming further away from the boat, drifting alone along with the current. He lifted his head above water and flapped his arms together, making one big push to go even deeper. But the shore wasn’t far away, so Lyle and the friends weren’t worried. Guppy spat out some water, which could be seen through the fuzzy haze of air. The friends called out jokingly, “A shark’s near!” but it was only Guppy, the sole proprietor of the open water. He snarled, bit the air, clenched his teeth, and snarled again—snarled right at Lyle and his friends and they all laughed. And Guppy swam out into the far waters as the sun grew hazy. The paper mill fired away, sending big plumes of hardy smoke that made the sky even more bleak. But the evening was perfect for all of them. Guppy just drifted along, and the whole place was quiet except for the rolling waves and the gentle rocking of the boat. They could all feel it. Then it was time to go. They lowered the sail, raised the anchor, and started heading south back to the point.

“Take the wheel, Guppy!” Lyle said. He wanted to sit up on the bow and just look at the stars one last time, letting the warm air soothe his face—and the cold air too, once they were further away from shore—and warm him as they drifted along in the open waters, so he could think again and dream again, even more.

And then he saw it—a shooting star—and made a wish. He made a wish, whether it would come true or not. Maybe the wish should have already come true, and he was living a dream.

And he realized it then—he was there. We are all stars, wrapped in flesh, glowing quietly, beneath the surface, he thought.

Straight ahead, the loon line—so far away—and that was the dock they were heading toward.

Guppy turned the wheel slightly to port, then to starboard, and they drifted between the lands of New York and Vermont, the little engine pushing them toward the lightly dimmed sea of masts afar.

They were on their way home again...

Saturday morning. Life was alive. The loon. The cardinal. The squirrel. The chipmunk. At once, Lyle thought of naming his boat The Cardinal, but it was neither red nor a cardinal by its nature.

A rainy morning. He sealed up the window that leaked in one corner but left it open when he returned from work to let the water spill onto the couch—and for him to dry it up quickly while snickering, knowing the leak was only getting worse and he had no means to fix it yet. So he let the water sit for a while and went to do other things.

Saturday evening. Busy. He met Pat, whom he had seen riding around in a golf cart, talking to other people walking along the shore. It turned out she was Chip and Ed’s mother—a nice woman with pretty, long, gray hair curled slightly.

He was looking at books in the library at the marina when he heard Pat talking to a tall man who had come down from one of the showers, wearing green drape-like shorts—you could almost see through them, but he didn’t care. Once Pat and the man were done talking, Lyle started talking to her, and she said, “Take all those books with you. They’re free.”

Lyle thought about it for a moment, wondering where he would put them if he did just that.

Coffee brewed in the corner. Old pictures hung in different parts of the room. Shelves were cluttered with what some would call junk.

Pat said that thirty years ago, families would come in from New Hampshire to spend their weekends there. They had a book club. They had a community. They knew each other. She wanted it to be like that again.

Then Lyle realized that when he had those talks with Guppy on the boat—and with others at the Mill—he’d thought about everyone he’d had those talks with. He thought about how we all wish things were just the way they were back then, when it was better (that’s the word they liked to use). All throughout the point, it was raining cotton. The docks were covered, so were the boats, and then the soft flakes began to fall gently on Lyle’s face. He stepped inside the cabin of his boat and wrote a short poem:

Raining Cotton

The skies are clear—

yet cotton drifts down,

from who knows where,

twinkling softly,

trickling to the still shore.

A bumbling fool lies on the bow,

chin raised, eyes tracing the dance above—

cotton brushing his face,

and suddenly,he’s a kid again in Kansas,

beneath the cottonwood,

dreaming and climbing,

summer settling on his skin.

And summer hasn’t changed—

not really—

no matter how far you say you’ve come,

it stays the same,

warm and endless,

calling you home.

Lyle leaves for Kansas on Wednesday. Homebound. Leaving the point behind. His farewell is not sad but a knowing farewell—knowing he will return after a long drive back to the middle state, the heartland, only to come back days later with a grand plan. He sees new people every day. This morning, awake and alone, he went up to the second-floor room to take a shower. He hurried quickly because above him, in the room upstairs, Pat could be heard watching television and making heavy footsteps moving through the building. But now that Pat and Lyle had said their hello just two nights ago when it was raining cotton, Lyle wouldn’t ever forget it—the cotton stayed, and his boat was made of cotton now. And now Pat and Lyle were no longer strangers but, in fact, distant friends. And Emmett, who stayed at home with his gal, wondering why he hadn’t been asked to join Guppy and Lyle on their most recent voyage. But Lyle knew Emmett had other plans for their soon-to-be great voyage in the weeks to come.

Lyle cleaned the boat and sprayed for ants and left the coffee maker right in its place so that he could make a pot as soon as he arrived from his trip of travels across America again. He fixed his pole real nice. Even managed to snag a wooden Plano tackle box that was well beyond its years, but he didn’t mind because a tackle box is still a tackle box, and it does what a tackle box does. He saw Travis, the old fisherman with a cane, some days and Lyle didn’t want to talk to him, but he was friendly, and the cane was new—or at least this was the first time he had seen him with a cane—but Lyle didn’t ask. Instead, as soon as he unraveled the sail from his bag and realized that it was not a jib but just another sail, he let it sit there and was disappointed and cursed and went back inside the cabin, pulling the lifelines and shaking from nearly falling in after a speeder boat had passed by and caused some real ripples toward the shore.

A Poem for Dreamers

Where do you go when you’re dreaming?

We never really leave.

We go somewhere only we can visit—

no one else.

That’s why dreaming is so special.

The best part?

You can go anytime.

Later that evening — Monday — Lyle strung up his fly rod and tied the fly to the leader. He walked to the edge of the dock and began casting. The water was very calm, and he could see bugs drifting down from the sky, landing on the surface, only to be snatched quickly by little fish. He felt lucky to catch one.

The first fish on the fly rod was a small crappie, no bigger than his finger. He startled at the omen, hearing a drone buzzing above. Looking up through the silent haze, he saw a hawk gliding over the trees. The red moon showed itself for the first time that night.

Lyle cast a few more times, getting better and worse at the cast all at once. Then he caught three more fish. When the mosquitoes started biting, he reeled in his line and walked back to his boat.

Around ten, he went to bed thinking about how Emmett and Jane would be coming to see him tomorrow.

Where is Andrew? He must’ve been sailing up the north waters for some time, a couple of days ago. He had told Lyle that he would be sailing a few miles north to see a friend, anchor the boat, and asked if Lyle wanted to sail together sometime. He said the small engine couldn’t have been bigger than the one he had seen on Lyle’s boat. At first, Lyle was skeptical of him, but Andrew started to show his colors — he was nice, and he wanted to sail boats just like Lyle did.

One day, Andrew appeared in front of him while Lyle was up at the bow, raising the sail, untangling and unraveling it. Andrew greeted him with a warm smile, and they talked nicely. Lyle liked that, and his feelings about Andrew changed then.

A day had passed, and Lyle stooped low to the ground after catching a quick glimpse of something unusual—something out of the ordinary to anyone wandering through a clover field. There beneath him, close to the earth, a four-leaf clover had been climbing, its fourth leaf torn down the middle. The sun broke through the clouds then, and Lyle thought to himself that he was, indeed, lucky.

June 3, 2025 | A Life in Rewind—where past and present coexist, like a ripple of water on the shore

A Tuesday night late supper at 9, as Lyle rode into the point on a turn of his thought that if he went up Route 22, he could see the orchard up one of the dirt roads right before his turn off Orwell, and its empty trees and wet branches because they had been wet all May—it was a monsoon May, the most rain he had seen since the great big floods he remembered from two years ago. He was reminded of a harvest so full of pears and apples and berries and peaches, so much fruit, and he ate all of them all the time, every day. And like all things, a tree is known for its fruit, as he had learned from a Bible verse he loved dearly in the book of Matthew, as he had said this to be of what the fruit has to offer in the world. His meal was nothing short of plain and boring but simple—beans and rice and shrimp, with some peas and carrots—eaten with an old bamboo spoon, cooked up quickly on his little stove in an old pot that was dented because he had banged against a wall after he was irate form some reason.

It was a lone week, a week of nothing, and he stumbled down a hill with wooden steps and fallen stones and rocks and twigs, marked with paw prints where a dog or raccoon, that he had concluded it to be, had once pressed its paws into the mud. It was still wet, so it wasn’t that long ago that someone had walked on the same path as him, and he thought that was also true for all things. A little bench sat there, starting to sink into the earth, and Lyle sat down, and it sank a little lower, and he sank his eyes onto the water. He’d just come back from a walk in the woods, not too far north of the point, so he could sit, and think, and wonder again—to not do anything for a moment, just to look at the world, and all of it. He looked out across the sunny, empty water at Fort Ticonderoga, while he rested on the Mount Independence shore. In a quiet little shaded area of trees, far off he could see Chipman Point and all its sea of masts—the sails of the boats resting on the water, sticking up like toothpicks. He sat there for a while and thought a little bit and thought up a good poem that he sketched down quickly. It went something like:

“Monsoon May is moody is moony

and the rain is pain is stained

with teardrops of long-lost trips

that have gone away in the dirt,

more dirt, time spurts,

that drift along the seams of the wavy sails

and then does it again tomorrow.”

After Lyle finished writing his short poem and he thought he had made something good and he wanted to show someone what he had wrote, he hiked up the trail and went back home, and back to the no-name sailboat. He started thinking about a name he could give it—Milky Way, he had once thought—no, not the chocolate bar but one to be with the stars. And Emmet had joked he should name the sailboat Stuart Little, like the talking mouse, and there is already a Stuart Little who lives on the boat with him, and all he does is rummage through the stern of the boat and probably has a nest and a home that he had worked together with fallen leaves and branches and string that had floated along the shore. But he couldn't think of a good name there. And he got a little sad because he realized he had said, said and done everything and anything he said to anyone ever, and now he didn’t know what to do next—yet his mind was still kind of in a bit of a void, a needless place, but a warm place, a quiet place, and so he could hear of God and wondered if God could tell him what to do, where to go, and what to be. It’s dark, it’s crowded. It’s not roomy. It's the void. He picked up the dirty bin filled with dirty water and cleaned it and rinsed it well and got around to washing the dishes that had been sitting in the sink for a week, with a little residue from the matcha that had turned the bowl green in some places. On this night, he pressed his ear up to the small window, where crisp air brushed against his face, and two docks over he could hear two people listening to music, talking and chatting about whatever it was they wanted to talk about. Lyle started to move his hands and jam along too.

It was a lazy afternoon, a lazy evening—a late, pink evening, thanks to her sunset, that very pink and very orange very fast—the kind that covers the sky and paints the white boats pink for a moment. Lyle left the hatch open a little too long, and a bunch of mosquitoes flooded into the cabin of the ship. He thought about leaving it open for a while longer, just to let some of the air in so he could have a little bit of freshness before climbing into his sleeping bag to wind down for the night, reading his book.

But the mosquitoes were so bad. He decided to close the hatch because there were just too many of them. He sprayed on some bug spray, trying to get rid of them. They went away for a moment—but then they came back. Twenty of them or more. He learned his lesson there. Around four in the morning, he woke up to the sound of what could’ve been a bird hunting for fish—swimming around the docks and making loud, ruckus noises. It wasn’t a fish, because he could hear it tethering through the water. Could’ve been a loon. He had seen a loon before, and loons are magical creatures—not a rarity near the lake, but a rarity inland. He’d seen one once with Oliver, at a pond near the Magic Mountain area. It’s when he’s alone at night that he starts to think about all the bad things happening in the world—the war in Gaza, the war in Ukraine, all this death and death and death, so much death it’s destroying even him from afar. And all he really wonders is what the world would be like if we all worked together, held hands for a moment, if we were all happy together for once—and all of that makes sense to him. It doesn’t give a lie anything, but it gives him something certain to talk to himself about—all the beauties that could be on planet Earth. He knows there’s still so much to look forward to, even though his life feels like wind. And he thinks about everything that has happened, and everything that’s happening now, and he’s always scared of what will happen next.

But that’s life. Lyle knew this to be true—the water, the wind, the telepathy of the moving sky across all skies now, all the seas of the world, all of time, and all into the cosmos. It was a filled night, only by himself—and he knew this all to be true. As true as true can be. That’s all this was: just truth. What was happening right now, right in front of him. Writing, his voice brightened by a deeper voice. The truth was one of those things. For the longest time, through all his travels, it had all come down to one thing—it had led him to God. A sign here, a sign there, everywhere. Matthew 12:33. Jesus says, Either make the tree good and its fruit good; or else make the tree corrupt, and its fruit corrupt—for the tree is known by its fruit.

And Lyle thought that was such a good thing to say. A good line. And very true.

June is on them—the June sun, the rain has passed, the monsoon May is long gone, and the wispy clouds drift between the ‘V’ of trees above the dark black pickup that has been there. Lyle had seen the man once before, putting on his duck boots, and then passing Lyle, who was slumping up the steep hill carrying his books, wiping away the crust from his eyes, and yawning big.

“Hello, good morning,” he says, and the man always says good morning and nothing more, then keeps on walking toward his car and drives down the windy road.

Lyle sees the field of cows in those early summer fields of bright sun-dipped green hills, with cows and their calves roaming on the tall grass and peacefully filling their bellies with the earth. Reflective sailboats hang onto the gooey light that follows the soothing wind, the breeze, the tease of life—a fellow of mold that finds mold in all things, that goes away or gets worse with time.

A long lone day and long lone week of nothing happening, and the stillness is on him. He is always on something, and he wonders what happened to the intensity of life. What happened to a fast-moving world? The fastness has fastened itself and buckled into the waterways of the flowy, snowy, growly, northward place, crashing against the shore of New York.

He can see the big cliff from afar, right where the train collides with the road up a hill that disappears quickly because of all the trees lightly carved out by a team of forest people who came in an abrupt moment of neighborly time. The house near the edge of the hill was said to worry about the train that quickly passes by—and all the neighbors knew this too, but hadn’t said anything yet. The one who lived in the house feared he would be hit by the train if there was no crossing guard, and rightfully so. They put one in the next day, and the engines are now heard three times coming to and fro from the north or the south. It’s a good feeling to Lyle, because all he thinks about are his February and March travel days spent roaming around the country on a train.

On the third of June, Lyle had heard from his brother, who had found God at the same time as Lyle, but Lyle had always known God was there on all his trips, and all his trips were just that—one big, long search for God or God’s way of saying he had planned all of this to happen. Now his brother planned to see him in August, fly to the Green Mountains, sail the boat, be on the water, and just talk. It was a good feeling for both of them because they missed each other, were sorry for their pasts, and wanted to make things right—to be brothers again. Summer is here, summer is fast, and August will be here tomorrow.

12:25pm - A Note in My Journal from May 28, 2025

"Somewhat of a restless night when I woke around four and could hear some rustling outside the boat close to my face, scratching, clawing, and my belief that it was climbing on the vessel, banging and thrashing in the water, a loud dance, a melodic tune paired with desolate air on the windless river. I could hear the thing, it was indeed just a thing because how could one know what a mystery of it is in the pitch black night when I'd look for it and it could see me before I see it, and I thought of it to be a night Loon, a beautiful bird hunting for its night meals of the fishes that have been flooding into these waters since my arrival. Rock me back to sleep, the current had been underway slowly, the mosquitoes are not all gone just yet as they buzz around my face that is covered just enough so that I can breathe and they won't go away. I've chosen to see with my ears just for this night."

May 27, 2025 | No More Wake, the Water Has Settled

The first sail was all Lyle and Emmett could talk about for the weeks that followed, and after they docked the boat around one in the morning, beaten and tired and cold and wet, their old sailor tops and bottoms were all shriveled and holey and missing buttons and zippers and strings to hold them together, yet they were very bright—orange and yellow and red—and that’s all that mattered to them, even though they were slightly bitter about it, and Lyle sat in the cockpit yawning big and said to Emmett, “Guide us into shore safely,” although they were still shaken up from a reef they bumped into after misreading a buoy that wasn’t lit with any lights, and they came to a sudden stop in the middle of the waters, pushing them forward in a sort of tacky mess, nearly knocking them off the boat, which would have looked comical from the shore if anyone had seen it. The calm waters made it easy for them to dock without hitting the tall tree close to the shore that had a long branch hanging out far over the water, the one Lyle was warned about when he bought his slip from Chip. They took Emmett’s car back up to Mallets Bay, driving north on a cold night, and dropped Lyle off at his car, which was right where they had left it—in front of the boat lines waiting to be launched into the water, a pretty serene sight once the clouds had cleared and the shadows of the large ships showed their true giant stature. Then they parted ways after a good moment of feeling like they had done something good in the world. They talked a couple days later and said that they both slept in their cars that night.

A few days later, Lyle had stayed a few nights on the ship, though the cushions were damp—because the air was tight, and airflow was needed to keep them from becoming a moist mess. Each evening he laid down and ended up wiping his face with a towel he kept set up on the counter next to his bed, slightly annoyed, and he did this again just a few hours later when the moistness had become even more dreadful than before. His life away from Chipman Point had just begun—he’d gotten a job as a handyman near Lake Bomoseen, about an hour south of where his boat was docked. Only a couple of days had passed, spent laying down late at night with the window cracked, cool air seeping in—though not all the way, because it was still late April and very cold. He laid his head on the pillow each night wondering if he should go back to the mill, pay his dues and respects, and finally keep the promises he’d made to himself years ago: to write his road books and dream again of one day becoming a famous writer.

When Sundays come around, when the end of the day has settled and the people on the main dock have all gone home, and when the days have begun to warm from the eerie cold that floats above the canal in the mornings from the south mountains, Lyle climbs out of the cabin and does his morning stretch, then takes a quick look back at his sailboat—just a few seconds, but they last long and he remembers them well. He walks along the corridor of stones and dirt and sand and up the steep hill, just so he can turn and stare back down at the docks, the small bay, and the two big sailboats that sit so still—held in a morning tune, with a fresh smell in the air that seems to make the fish jump from the water with joy. On this particular Sunday, a couple of fishermen sat by the dock with a candle lit not too far from them, making a nice glow with their shadows reaching slightly overboard and their voices muffled yet clear, illuminating the surrounding waters and Lyle’s boots that were just touching the little part of the water. In front of him was Paul, which extended far out into the ocean bay with the sailboat sitting across the waters, docked up against the movie fisher all around. But Paul wasn’t catching a single fish; instead, he just sat there peacefully, listening to the water shake and rumble and all its quietness.

But he heard Lyle coming down the steep quarter path and turned slightly but didn’t look his way and just carried on enjoying his night, as Lyle was going to do once the boats had been moved out of the shore and onto the water. Lyle started to see a little bit here and there of a camper, which was parked right behind a solid line of trees, and people were in it, sitting at a round table, the light catching his eye. He burst by, trying not to be seen. He just saw peaceful conversation having them on them. There were three of them—a man, a woman, and a kid—and they were talking and laughing and eating something for dinner. Maybe it looked like pasta, Lyle wasn’t sure. He chuckled as he walked through the long corridor and made his way to the long stretch of dirt, rocks, and metal mess that was so dark that when he arrived home late at night, it was hard to see. For a moment, he thought someone was a prowler, but it could’ve just been a shadow of his own.

Once he passed the first building, he saw the boat that the old man had helped him with the other day when he was struggling to do his own boat. Sometimes Lyle peeked inside just to see if the old man was there, to give him a warm welcome and say all the nice things he had done for him that day when he was in a bind and the boat was caught by a gust from the south and was really beat over in the yard before taking a sharp right into the dock where the boat was docked. Laughter came from ahead around the small fire for people, and Lyle heard the voice of what sounded like it could be Chris, Mark, or Harry—the gentleman who had talked about the boat the day before. His crazy laugh, his work laugh, a laugh with a raspy tone that sounded like a voice Lyle had heard long ago when he worked a construction job he didn’t like very well, thinking he could only do…

...Lyle closed the hatch and took off his boots just before nighttime, unlacing them and shaking out the gravel after his worn feet ached from walking all day. It hadn’t stopped raining since April. The trees were growing greener and greener with water splashing around his face, and he could hear the rain—not just hear it, but really hear it. It talked to him, talked to everyone, but right now it was only talking to the man kicking stones down the boardwalk toward his lone sailboat. There were holes in his socks. People showed up for night swims, night rides, or night fishing. The dark was fixed. The waters were calm, peaceful rain filling the windowsill at the broken mesh, and there was a slight odor—not good, rather salty or bad. A good clean and wash might do the truck some good. Tomorrow was a new day. The sun might shine. If it didn’t, nothing had changed. Each day was the same—for better, of course—but always the same.

Lyle took quiet steps, stepping from the dock over the lifelines and across the boardwalk—that slippery slope, afraid to fall in the water, making a loud whooshing noise that woke the lady sleeping in the top room of the old Chip Point building. He was up before dawn and arrived after sunset. The cabin had become a little space where he could think, talk into his studio notebook, and dream. Just dream, as he heard the fish splash around once in the morning and once in the evening. The same fish. He wondered if they all looked the same. It was always the same.

The morning of today—daybreak—opened up to the great land as Lyle came down the hill leaving the boat. The early morning sun cast a light smog that rolled and sat still along the front bank of a mistletoe tower of a mountain, with little cows grazing in the distance looking like little polka dots rolling along and staying still in the grass. Coming down into the valley was where a little river had flooded into the grassy plains of someone’s field, and two young boys were canoeing along. It must’ve been deep enough for the canoe anyway to try along the water, and it looked like good fun too—a bit of a tour this morning. Later that day, Lyle had been dreading having to cancel the flight he’d planned to Japan in October, even though he had been certain this year he’d be going. Everywhere he went on the road in February, March, and April, all he heard from different people was “Go to Japan.” Part of him thought he couldn’t keep going on all these strenuous adventures only to have them and not write about them afterward. So, Japan would have to wait—for now, he thought, as he picked up the Japanese language book, he’d been given for Christmas last year and began scanning its pages again and again, trying to spark some ember in his chest for going somewhere far away, in hopes of learning something about the world.

9:45am - A Note in My Journal from May 22, 2025

"This page is stained with a coffee spill from two days ago when I was hurrying off the dock because it started to sink really low—all because it hasn’t stopped raining for four days and the water levels are very high, although not as high as they once were some odd years ago. I know this because the concrete steps that lead into the marble and stone building, right out-front underneath, have writings—or engravings, or carvings—of different dates and the high waters that had come once: 1972, 1973, 1984, 1992, 1996, the year I was born. The finesse of them cannot be removed, and the people who wrote them are long gone. If you were walking around aimlessly, you would miss the significance of them. So I wrote all these dates so that I could remember them, and maybe when a talk starts with me—someone who had been here when the water was high and the boats were in a mad frenzy floating above the docks and throughout the waters—then I would know, and I wouldn’t forget. It has gotten quiet in recent days, and I need to find someone to share this talk with."