From-Aways Lament
Is this how it feels to be a drug addict, a feeling I’m having in my sophomore lecture class trying to read something while watching the students suffer under the weight of a midterm exam. You’d think there is enough to do but however busy this moment seems to be my mind is elsewhere, on something I realize I need. And in fact on returning to my office I quickly go to travelocity.com, which comes up immediately on my very fast academic hard wired computer. With appointment book in hand a relatively cheap flight appears on the screen precisely on the day when lectures end yielding up to six days before the necessity of returning to those sophomores to administer their dreaded final examination. Six whole days in Cape Breton – yes? It would be no use asking my wife because the answer is certain. She would be grateful to get me out of the house rather than have me moping about wishing I were elsewhere.
Imagine being elsewhere – approaching Antigonish in that stretch where the hills rise up on both sides of a road bordered by rushing white water foreshadowing the magnificence of the Margaree Valley. And then the dull highway scenery reasserts its control forcing one to wait another nearly two hours before reaching the Canso Causeway. What shall we do, take the route along the west coast of Cape Breton – the choice of the on again off again view of the Bay of Saint Lawrence with the possibility of stopping for a bottle of that marvelous whiskey that is not allowed to be called Scotch, or the road to Whycocomagh where we can take a left to a twisting and turning two lane road leading us to an orange ball of light just ready to disappear over rolling hills to our left? We drive too fast surprised again and again by the sharp turns until we are past Lake Anslie finally coming to the one lane bridge, which signals that the end is near – that stop sign - the arrival at Coady Road. Oh, Coady Road, that dirt marvel, a road whose every massive pot hole and rut can be felt in Manhattan nearly nine hundred miles away, where the fear that we’ll break an axle as the right front tire falls into that hole at the bridge that takes us over Collins Brook stays with us year round wherever we are.
I’m jolted out of my reverie and returned to my fast computer! A tap of the keys and weather.com comes to the screen and I stumble over my resolve on discovering that the average temperature in mid December is in the teens, Fahrenheit excuse me. There’s a wood stove that heats only half the house and heats not too too well even on a chilly summer evening and there is no insulation in the roof. However, there is a sleeping bag, one that is winter weight that sits useless in the closet of my Manhattan home. Now let’s get practical.
If the kitchen stove could be connected to the small propane tank stored in the basement, then water could be heated, and if it could be figured out, the oven could be lit supplying heat following on the tradition of tenement living during the winter in New York City. But the water will be turned off, the pipes protected against the freezing temperatures. Well there is the Margaree Co-Op. They’ll have water. And then one could turn right out of the Co-Op parking area after buying that water and travel along the Margaree River, an especially beautiful stretch of road, and even more so when the sky is full of that conflict so typical of Cape Breton, which that road always seems to amplify – something about those hills and that river and that valley having made peace with each other over eons of time while the sky rages on.
However, these imaginings are momentarily fractured as thoughts arise of an empty home and frozen fingers dragging that tank of propane to its outside site and fumbling with the freezing pipe and bolting the tank in, hoping that my skin would stay with my fingers. And then it might be raining, even freezing rain. Maybe the house will be completely inaccessible – buried in snow. Damn that imagination going every which way from elation to depression, from soldiering on to retreating.
But one would be outside and could turn away from the task at hand – those hills, that vista. And there is always the outdoors for those special needs, yes the outdoors, part of what we from-aways come for, that marvelous feeling of the absence of boundaries, the silence, Nature. And then what about those warm kitchens in the homes of our friends, the smell of the baking pies, the roasting free range chicken, the magical entry on closing the door against the crystalline cold, one’s breath turning invisible again, and using that special device to remove one’s boots, experiences that are impossible to reproduce in the busy cosmopolitan Manhattan or where ever else us from-aways find ourselves, places where there might not be the cold and the rural character to encourage togetherness but instead other forces such as a busy city pushing us away from each other – one never drops in without an invitation or at least a phone call. Oh what a bounty, Cape Breton, what a rush, what a special place. But wait.
Sanity pushes her foot in the door and begins to overwhelm the addictive cravings. Think of the loneliness without family, of the empty feeling as the door opens to my home on the ridge without those beloved voices, without those smells of occupancy. Remember the bats? Have they returned in our absence and will they be my only company? Has red squirrel moved back in through that hole in the wall rotted out by the leak before the new roof was installed, that blasted squirrel so angry at us that he/she bit through the clothes lines last summer dumping all the wet laundry in the dirt.
No, regretfully the imaginary door must close, close travelocity.com, close weather.com and realize that writing this was enough. Addiction to the Margaree will have to go cold turkey until another time. The price is too high, and the kids are too busy with their school schedules and all the things kids do. They could not leave New York or where ever we from-aways are away to.
But the addictive rush will come on again and will never be solved until there is some resolution of the conflict, a solution to the problem of living simultaneously in South West Margaree, and in my particular situation, New York City, about which there is too much to love to leave permanently, not even mentioning that a living is made there. Is this how a bigamist feels? How did this fix ever arise and how to fix it? Are there any answers from someone who has dealt with this problem, which all of us from-away are suffering in some way, especially those of you who were born in Cape Breton and must, for some good reason, live away. For you it must be even worse.
I glance again at the computer screen, at travelocity.com, but quickly turn away. I remember what my wife’s Canadian born grandmother used to say, “Let’s not and say we did.” What she meant was, let’s not and imagine we did. I did.