June 17, 2025 | A Moment Away, A Moment Awaits

The last light cast out into the dark waters, when the water was all calm and the moon was rising high into the empty sky, as the setting sun had finally dipped below the one peak high above Fort Ticonderoga. The stars had come out, twinkling and dazzling in the summer night and on the summer boat, and the tunnel light broke into a cone on the water’s surface, and we were all stars sitting on the boat and laughing while Emmett began to fillet the five fish we caught. They were small fish, and Lyle began to wonder if, once the fish and its fillet had been tossed into the pot of oil, it would shrink and get smaller and deciding who would eat what since we were all very hungry. And they began making jokes, saying, we will have to ration tonight. “But I have first pick since I caught the first fish,” Lyle said, and they laughed more. Only hours earlier, Lyle and Emmett made a great bet—though they didn’t shake hands, they said it loudly: whoever catches the first fish will have to buy ice cream for everyone. They had all thought about Kelly’s Snack Shack down the road from the Mill in Wallingford, and they would ride bicycles to and fro most summer nights—around five or six or whenever they had these fast feelings—when all they wanted to do was ride bicycles and eat maple cones, maple creamies, and maple everything. Since Lyle caught the first—they had gone three hours without catching a single one, and now they were catching everything, from little crappie to little minnows to little what Lyle called walleye, but they were not the same fish, but they kept them anyway. And back to the last cast, when Emmett swung his line forward and backward, scratching the soundless wind, and Lyle’s whipped into the far waters where his fly had landed. He pulled the line in with long strokes, short, and patient, and then he strung up a fish bigger than all the others, and Lyle screamed, “Big fish! Big fish!” The fish jumped from the water’s surface and face-planted on the glassy lake. Emmett ran up to him from the port side of the vessel and lay flat across the deck and pulled the line up out of the water—only for it to snap and break. And all the hope that Lyle was seeing had been lost right away. They stood there for a moment and said nothing. Then Emmett went back to cleaning the fish they had caught, and one was still flopping. Lyle, still saying nothing, went over to the fish and pushed a knife through its skull and said, “Thank you, fish, for feeding us tonight.”

Then, with Lyle’s line still broken, he began to tie a new fly to the end of the leader while using Emmett’s light, who kept moving in the shadows. Lyle was getting angrier and looked more intent as he started making long sighs each time the line slipped from under his sticky fingers. He wiped them over and over on his dirty pants, which had been covered in the blood of one of the fish he was told to kill. He kept sliding the line through the loop of the hook, but it kept falling apart. Then Lyle told Emmett to cut off the heads and gut them and to not fillet them anymore because the fillets were too small, and they could just pick around the bones, salt them, and put them in butter—it would all be fine. And so Emmett did just that, tossing the fish they were able to hold onto into a pan and swishing them around until he said they were clean. Then he went back into the cabin, lit one of the big stoves, and poured in the peanut oil until it started to boil. It was very hot in the cabin, which was nice because it had started to get cold on the deck, but the air was mostly calm, and the boat was very still. Then he dumped the pail of fish into the pot, and they all watched. This is where Lyle began to go into his long, deep thought... For a long time, Lyle wanted to be left alone, wanted to be far away—where no one could find him, where no one could see him—only to return again with stories and glimpses into the life he’s lived, the lives he’s led, the lives he’s seen. And all of this he says, and she says, and they says. But now, after the long trials and tribulations of that part of his life—now that it’s over—all he wants is to be with the people he loves and knows, and he says, and she says, and they’re all together, floating down on the water with a sail raised high, half-mast or no mast, there on the water, floating north to the promised land. And once the fish were cooked, they stirred and swished the rice, beans, and vegetables around in a pot, then covered it while they fished out the fish. They began to serve them onto each other’s plates, and they ate a meal together in the low cabin under the soft light—dim with the years past—of old, aging sailboats in waters that were new to them, and new to everyone, for everyone to take back home again. Lyle picked up a fishing pole again. He wondered when the last time was—four years, five years, maybe longer—but it had been so long he’d forgotten why he loved to fish in the first place. From his early years with Mom’s teachings and all their lessons, tricks, and gizmos—cleaning the fish, sharpening the blades that lay a fish flat on the wooden picnic table, pieces in the pond once done, right along with Chris. He would’ve stayed longer if the sun had gone down a little later, but his arrival at the dock—goodbye to Emmett and Jane as they came running up the hill past the old brick building—left Lyle alone to watch the water. The moon was bright, line cast out, fly jigging along the dock pier, hoping to catch one more fish before the night ended. Instead of goodbyes, he stayed by the dock and looked down on the water. His casts were odd, thrown back and forth, messy, but Lyle said nothing and was quiet until he tied the line back onto the pole and went about his sleep until morning came.

Lyle’s brother is getting married on Saturday. Lyle left Vermont late in the afternoon, leaving behind a pail of fish, fry dishes, and a bagel bin beneath the floor of the boat—the bilge overflowing, the bathroom door shut because it stinks, Now he’s driving along the alone highway, parked somewhere between the New York state line and the Ohio state line—summer, and a little peak of Pennsylvania. He’s sitting among cars in a dead parking lot at 10 PM, and all he can think about is being back on the water—wondering who he might share all these little moments with out there. His troubles are over—but are they really? He’s left Vermont again, driving his old car 1,500 miles across the country. His mind isn’t stagnant—he’s seen it all. He knows. He knows it well. He knows the rough. He knows the tough. He knows the road. Little glimmers of past trips flash back—Xenia, Ohio; London, Ohio; passing the Erie Canal; all those main roads and highways. He’s just seen it. That’s all—he’s seen it. But he doesn’t feel the same excitement he once did when he first took this trip, or that trip, or any trip. Those early feelings of the road—the idea that maybe he belonged out there more than anywhere else—feel distant now. And yet, he always comes back to something he once told Charlie: “You should know your roots—even if you grow them. You should stay planted somewhere and let them grow. Grow wild. Free. Let them dig themselves into the ground. Dig them deep so they might stay a while.”

Back on the road and traveling west then east again...

A Road Poem

These are the things he misses about the road—

when you’re driving east on Highway 121 and the sun’s coming up behind you,

rising from the east,

and there’s no place to be,

no place to go,

just being.

That’s when everything floods back in—

floods in like a wave,

like the washing of the board wand of magical questions.

And the road that leads back home

is the same one that goes far,

far away.

It takes him back to the mill.

Takes him back to the river.

Takes me back to a new story

that still has to be written.

Chester Blvd.

Richmond.

Indianapolis.

Dayton.

Crossing state lines

in a beat-up, raggedy car

that keeps going.

There’s only one way to get home:

There and back.

Time is short.

he's here, then gone.

One minute he stays,

the next it’s flown.

And it goes by faster and faster

as the years go on and on.

Lyle's 29.

And he's been doing this for eight years now—

eight years of trains, buses, thumbing, hopping, riding.

Traveling.

The traveling man.

The traveler’s way.

It’s all part of the big old plan—

crossing under pink skies,

painted clouds like Michelangelo’s brush,

and the construction of the road,

always being worked on,

always unfinished.

The chapel.

And morning has come.

And Lyle wants to be in the mountains again,

heading east on Highway 123,

or whatever highway he's on.

Coming back through New York, he passed through the town of Friendship. The name alone—Friendship—sounded like a place he’d want to live. It sat in a tight valley, with the mountains to the left beginning to descend south, dipping deep into little logging areas. Pastures appeared in the midst of the rows of trees, and in between those trees was the little town of Friendship. Just friends, everywhere. Friends, friends—friends that sat on top of the hill, six or seven homes along the road that led down. All this driving, all this sitting still and thinking, had to come around again—his mind drifting into a daze of sail travels. He thought: If my purpose is to sit by a river and watch the waves roll by, with the birds singing, harmonious tears falling from the sky, and all the ground and dirt and stones and pebbles and little things that make me feel deep things—then I found it at Chipman Point. And so he started driving into the green mountains and further east, where he had deemed his home again and where the Mill awaited his arrival.