At Todd Lake

The thing about Todd Lake is that the water is warm, even though it’s a mountain lake, and it’s really shallow; you can still touch in the middle. So you can go out there even if you’re afraid of swimming, and you should, because the other thing about Todd Lake is that there’s a mountain on each end, and from the middle you can twirl and see both.

At one end of the lake (where you can see Mt. Bachelor) there’s a meadow, and in the meadow there’s a family, and in the family there’s these two kids. The kids are playing and yelling (or laughing? hard to tell) and from a distance they feel like Leo’s kids in Inception, which is to say they are perfect but also faceless. Like, it doesn’t matter who their parents are or what their life has been like or who they’ll grow up to be. From this distance, they’re just symbols for whatever it is we want children to embody; innocence, ignorance, joy?

Or maybe it isn’t the distance, but the place. It’s the kind of place that seems to exist outside of the world I know, and maybe outside of time, too. There’s just too much good here to leave any room for what I’ve been or what I’m going to be. There’s only one moment at a time. So while Noah and Maddy drift further down the boardwalk, I hang back, waiting for that tiny instant when they are about to become a part of the landscape—about to, but haven’t just yet.

Near the upper border

The sun goes down and comes up a few miles from the Canadian border, where they’ve cleared a swath 100 yards wide to mark the divide. No wall, but they’ve probably got sensors, Sam says, you know, for the draft runners. I mean, the covid dodgers. The runaways. Rule of thumb, don’t send your citizens scrambling for a better place.

Anyway, they let the bears go through. We’ve seen bear gouges on trees, bear poop on the trail, but no bears, yet. We did see a man, though; he appeared in our camp early in the morning. He wore flip flops duct-taped to his feet and didn’t carry any water. He was doing the whole trail in a few hours. He was there and gone. We packed up camp and brought the food down from the tree and got a move on; I sort of hoped we’d hit the valley stream before the real heat of the day, but we weren’t in a rush. Out here, how could we be?

Elevator

The elevator stopped somewhere between the 35th and 36th floors. After 15 minutes had passed he finally looked at her and said, "Isn't this something?" She replied, "I would prefer if we didn't speak." As the night fell and the rain began to fall and the night staff replaced the day staff he decided to sit, to slide down the side of the elevator onto the ground, even though he knew it made him look weak.

After two days had passed and no one had come she said "Perhaps it would be okay if we were to talk," but by then he had forgotten how.