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."