four short meditations on the theme of impermanence

From Jack Main, a work in progress

These reveries provided an outlet for his imagination; they were a satisfactory hint of the unreality of reality, a promise that the rock of the world was founded securely on a fairy's wing.

—F. Scott Fitzgerald

When I was just a child, barely old enough to form a thought, let alone express it, my father—in the prime of his manhood, preternaturally energetic, and fearless with any kind of tool in hand—undertook to remodel our “new” house, a ramshackle old Victorian one block from Hop Springs’ Main Street, after we’d been in it for barely a year. The first phase of his plan, which would have horrified the town’s preservation committee had there been one, was to lift a portion of the roof to make space for an additional bedroom and bath. Had I been consulted, I would not have objected to this, but what I learned on the day the plan was put into motion was that it also entailed punching out a wall in my snug little bedroom. This was revealed to me, from a safe distance, when, blithe and unsuspecting in my mother’s arms, I witnessed him throw his full strength into that first swing of the sledgehammer against the calming, sheltering surface of that baby-blue wall (painted by my mother with my “help”), which had for the past year held a hostile world at bay while I slept. The fact that I have carried this memory into the last third of my life tells you all you need to know not only about the immediate impact of that hammer blow on my sense of security as a child (my coming unglued in the moment—predictably, one would have thought—being a detail hardly worth mentioning), but also my understanding forever after of the untrustworthy nature of appearances and the fateful impermanence of everything.

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My father was so full of energy he might have been described as too alive, as I believe I once overheard my mother say. When he decided to join the National Guard, she did not object. It got him out of the house for one weekend a month and two weeks each summer, which was good for him and equally good for her, to hear her tell it. There is a book about the National Guard entitled A Very Long Weekend. The “weekend” in question was the Korean War. The day he left for active duty I was inconsolable, but he tried anyway. He promised me, when he got back, he’d dig out his camping gear, get ahold of a boat, and take me camping, just the two of us, on the river. He was killed by a sniper’s bullet in the rugged hill country near the demarcation line between North and South Korea at a place that came to be called “Heartbreak Ridge.” I was six years old. This made a wound in me so deep and permanent. The only reason I make mention of it here, in a meditation on impermanence, is the obvious one: I thought he, if no one or nothing else, was surely permanent. And he wasn’t.

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Remember my last visit with the old man, where we talked about Dikathapon and his special relationship with Kay-O, the white mare? The strangest thing, to me, looking back, is that the subject of the Long Valley Dam, which was nearing completion then, never even came up. But afterward, as I was driving back to town from Tools Creek through the narrowest stretch of the valley, where the road squeezed down so close to the river it was routinely subject to flooding in the spring and on at least two occasions that I can think of completely washed out, it finally really hit me, what the big dam would actually mean for the situation on the ground, as they say, and I started to picture it. The river backing up on itself, jumping its banks, flooding the road once and for all, and rising, slowly but inexorably 400 feet up the valley’s shoulders, like water filling a tub. Primeval ecosystems of land and water with their intricately intertwined chains of interdependent life forms, visible and invisible, suffocating under the weight of the growing lake for a distance of 20 miles. Trees clear cut in preparation for this calamity. All man-made structures—churches, stores, houses, hotels, lodges, barns—demolished and carried off or abandoned to the waters. The towns of Hop Springs, Gin Flat, and Bootjack wiped off the map. Indian burial grounds and other sacred sites, some as many as 6,000 years old, inundated, lost. And on a scale of one, my own roots, my past—the first third of my life—poof! Gone.

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The day Bill H.—high school classmate and best friend—turned 18, he skipped school, drove down to the county seat, and signed on with the Marines, whose amphibious landing at Da Nang a month earlier had stirred something in him. When he got back to town, he found me in the Evergreen, sitting at the counter, nursing a coke, in the company of another friend, Bob K. He informed us what he had done and invited us to tie one on with him. We accepted without hesitation and headed immediately to Malone’s, where Jennie served us without scruple on account of the occasion, and other patrons, as they straggled in, insisted on buying us rounds once they learned of it, especially the veterans. Things got good and loud as the night wore on and the party grew in size, but no one became unbearably obnoxious that I recall, and the three of us held our own as best we could. Jennie, God bless her, saw to it that we got something to eat.

After last call, we stumbled down to the river, which ran behind the town, hardly a quarter of a mile from Malone’s at the most. No better way to clear your head than to sit by a dark river and contemplate a midnight, drunken, drowning swim across. We sat on the gravelly beach, a favorite hang-out spot, with our backs to a big old drift log that had landed there the previous spring, and discussed, for starters, the rubrics of throwing up. Bill had this boon, a magic thought: cold mashed potatoes. Bob, who still tended to act a little childish sometimes, stood to demonstrate his method, which involved jumping up and down while slapping the belly and hooting like an owl. For me, I had to confess, it was just a matter of leaning over and beginning to drool. The rest followed.

There were no stars that night. What I remember was a light mist and the glow from houses up the bank. Having come off our highs pretty much simultaneously, we began to talk in a desultory way about metaphysical loss and disillusionment—though these weren’t the exact words we used—closing in, finally, on how unrequited love (“Is there another kind?” Bill asked) opens the door to all manner of disappointment in existence. The specifics behind these musings, I’m not all that sorry to say, elude me now.

Bill, to be clear, had been one of the smartest kids in our class until he’d stopped caring about school. That was right around the time he stopped listening to his father, a small-minded but highly opinionated man, and started to hate Hop Springs, for the smallness of it. He would tell me these things, and I, fatherless, would listen. That was fundamental to our friendship.

He was always a hard worker though, Bill, and that never changed. He was strong and competent, having worked from boyhood on Otto Schwenzer’s farm, where, among other things, he stabled a horse he’d earned with his first year’s wages. I don’t know that there was anything he loved better on earth than that horse, riding her and just generally caring for her. He didn’t let anyone else ride her that I know of, but he did let me.

This is by way of background for how things drifted that night on the beach, which could have ended with the discussion of unrequited love as far as I was concerned. I was exhausted by that point—we all were—and while nobody ever wants to be the first to admit it, sleep was the thing I was looking forward to more than anything.

Then it came out: that morning, before going down county to enlist, Bill had sold his horse to a rancher from over in Double Rock.

“What was it the Green-Eyed One used to say?” he asked, after giving me some time to absorb this bombshell, which, face it, under the circumstances, I should have seen coming.

He was looking hard at me. My prom date wore a lot of makeup around the eyes, which Bill could not forgive, and spouted poetry to get attention.

I knew the line he meant, he’d asked before. “The Stevens?” I asked.

He rolled his eyes.

I cleared my throat. “‘The squirming facts exceed the squamous mind,’” I recited, paused, “‘If one may say so.’”

“One may as well,” he said, chuckling.

Bob made a loud snorting noise right there—if anybody else were to try that their nose would bleed.

The conversation, having been recharged, did go on for a while longer after that, but I don’t recall any of it. I do seem to remember that here and there, at wide intervals, a big fish would jump in the river. The rest of the time, I picture one or another of us tossing the occasional stone. Eventually, we stopped talking altogether. We were so tired. Bob was rubbing his forehead vigorously with both hands, which was a thing he did, while Bill was staring fixedly at the ripples in the shallows. I was watching Bill with heavy eyes, fighting to stay awake, when a dark thought came to me, followed by an insight: funny, how you can imagine another person’s death but not your own. I searched for something to say, gave up, hit him gently on the arm. The river was making this faint creaking noise, which I hadn’t noticed till that moment. It was like the sound a saddle makes under a rider’s shifting weight. Or—the mind does play tricks—a boat lashed to a dock, invisible in the dark.

Thomas Shane is a contributing editor for Arcadia. His story “Channel Surfing” can be found online at Per Contra, “The Catbird’s Cry” at Mount Hope. Other publication credits include Aethlon, American Way, Elysian Fields, Light, Other Voices, River Oak Review, Slippery Elm and Trajectory, and the anthologies Fresh Water and When Last on the Mountain: The View from Writers over 50. He has also been runner-up or finalist in a number of writing contests, including the Glimmer Train Fiction Open, the International Imitation Hemingway Competition, and the Dzanc Books Short Story Collection Contest.

For more work by Thomas Shane, visit his page at our Online Sundries site.