Is it strange to honor Labor with a day off?

Perhaps a respite from work befits the occasion, but this is now what most of our Holidays have been reduced to; a brief release from the regularity of economic doings; a chance to turn aside from a tide that prefers to described itself statistically.

Let us pause to speak some words of those who are so numbered.

Of how enumeration does not settle all the accounts of their Lives,

nor accurate accounting dispel their Mystery.



I have not meant for this page to be personal, exactly.

At least not to examine the minutia of my life.

I've tried to gain a broader view, from a higher vantage point.

But the last place that I?ve been,

I wish to tell of,

and, you see,

I cannot say where,

without a little saying why.



So typical of this scrambled World, I found myself mixing the uses of my holiday. Or mixing Holiday and vacation, which, though sometimes interchangeable in parlance, are by no means the same thing. If vacation is a getting away, literally vacating, my lot was to be filled, with something more than mere business.



Family business, they call it: I went to Detroit on family business.

The focus of that business, the thing that brought me, and my sister, (who lives overseas,) the reason we were there, was for the sake of our father, who is eighty one years old, and, let it be said, in decline.


This must be admitted, for it is the tenuous fact of his existence that animates this whole episode of my Life.

And if it is my Life,

then it will be his Death.



Yes, Death.

We do not like to speak of it,

but it will not go unrecognized.

We glance at it, as at the Sun.

We allude, as with a bleak joke that is no joke.

And we speak of Life,

as if it were the only thing for us to know.



Or so it went between me and my father.

Doing our best with what is left, but hard put to face the hard truths.

What saddens most is that he was always good at facing things, finessing his way through a life full of close choices and tight margins, somehow managing to provide, under whatever duress. He was always willing to sacrifice for his children, but not for himself. Now, that chance is past. He had not the will (means are an issue too, but I think mostly it's the will) to make the choices that might have left him more control at this point. Now those choices are being made for him.



His transportation, his housekeeping, his financial affairs, require outside attention. Some good things were accomplished, mostly at the initiative of my sister. She had not seen him in some time, and was less prepared than I to face the state of his household, but maybe I share his weakness, and maybe I (like him) find it hard to switch rolls, doing for him what he once did for me.



Certainly it's one of the great virtues of our species, that children care for aged parents. Look at the panoply of plants and animals: most offspring are loosed without regard. Among the 'higher' animals, at least, some degree of nurturing is practiced by most parents, but only we retain our ties throughout our lives. And only human children look to preserve their parents, long after their duty to the genetic stream is done.



Well, this is the sort of thing I think about, but it's hard for me to talk of with my father, he having less use now for my kind of sophistry. Once he practiced well enough himself, but life is much more basic for him now, Life and Death are daily presences, not fodder for metaphor and abstraction.

So I say what I can, in ways he seems to accept.



Some things are harder to accept than others.

He's been told he must stop driving.

This is hard on all levels; practically, of course; but especially on the levels of personal control and freedom.



Always I remember my father driving. On countless simple weekend trips, to woods and beaches, through faded countrysides in Michigan and Canada. Or on one of those vague, motel-hopping rambles we called a vacation. Just the two of us then, my mother not amenable to the style of travel. She opted out of the situation long since, and lives in good health, with a dignity and grace that I can only hope for.

Or work for.

I, unlike my father, have time to work on things.



Having such time, I had seen fit to schedule myself a vacation within my vacation. Like most children, I am not so selfless as I may protest, and I knew that the trip would take an emotional toll, and that I would need a respite from its labors. So I set out driving, and thinking of my father, driving the same road before me.



The road led to Point Pelee, a national park in Canada.

Pelee had been a favorite destination in my childhood. How many Summer Sundays found us there? Sometimes it seemed like every week. Not a slick, lifeguarded swimming hole, like the local Metroparks. Point Pelee is just that: a point; a triangular peninsula that juts down into Lake Erie, its ever shifting terminus marking the southern extreme of Canada. The Park is famous as a birdwatching site, forming, somewhat like Central Park, a migrant trap, but a natural one. I remember hearing about the birds, though I never saw many of them. We usually went during high Summer, between the migration periods. I chased butterflies, and snakes, and spiders, and went swimming on the calm west side, or thrashed in the waves on the windy eastern beach. No, in childhood I had other things on my agenda; it took me all my life to start to see the birds. And now, at the start of the Fall migration, a coincidence of interest, nostalgia, and availability made Pelee an irresistible side trip.



I set out before the Sun, for a two day stay, with little planning, figuring on finding a cheap motel at evening. I didn't even have a map. Which probably helped when I got lost. Actually, southern Ontario is too simple to get very lost in. The roads are fewer, the pace slower, the encroachment of the suburbs scant. The Point is less than forty miles from the Detroit/Windsor border. On the American side, most of that distance would be filled by the city and its sprawl, but the Canadian side remains much the same as in my youth, a broad plain of working farmland, divided by dirt roads (called concessions), and studded with modest towns and four-corners which never pretend to fashionable quaintness. The contrast with 80 mph America was striking. Despite the almost seamless border, and the language continuity, it's a different world there, so much less pedal-to-the-metal than ours.



I live in a city that makes Detroit look vacant, let alone Canada. That is my choice, but if I relish the density of our culture, I also find it necessary to seek its obverse, which is what this page is really all about. So lets get to it: what about Point Pelee? What about the plants, and the birds, and the bugs?

Well, they're still there.

And very much as I remembered, yet I was not, on that first day, suffused with nostalgia. For the landscape is a living, ongoing thing, with a Life that looks only forward. And my first memory was one I'd been happy to forget: the sharp bite of the black fly. Stable Flies, to be technical. They pester the park unpredictably, but regularly, in late Summer, and the moment I stepped on the beach, I was covered with them. I reluctantly applied insecticide, which seemed to dissuade them from biting, but not from swarming. I was forced to retreat, flailing hopelessly, just to keep them off my face.



The interior of the park was not so badly beset by the flies, and I ended up on the Woodland Nature Trail. What's remarkable about Pelee is the number of different habitats contained in one, relatively small, area. It has beaches much like sea shores, with scrubby dunes. It has extensive marsh and grassy savanna. And it has genuine forest. The forest was always a favorite of mine, and the Canadians consider it special. It's part of a small strip of what they call Carolinian Forest, the only such in Canada, which is mostly Boreal Forest: the northern coniferous woods. In fact, Carolinian is an out of date term for what we call the Eastern Deciduous Forest: the broadleaf woods which cover, if only in remnant, the eastern US. So it's my forest, exotic only from the foreign perspective.

But special nonetheless.




Central Park seems sanitized in comparison with those woods. The musty odor of rich decay filled my nostrils, a quality sorely lacking in the emaciated city park. Everywhere you looked something was going on. Something eating, or being eaten. Something blooming, or rotting. I know many more names than I did as a child, but I was overwhelmed by the diversity. Lots of Walnut trees, which are rare in most places, due to lumbering, and plenty of Oaks, including Chinquapin Oak, which I have not encountered before, at least not with consciousness. What I did remember, though I haven't seen it since...well, when was my last visit? The early 70s? Twenty five years ago?... still I recall the fruit bundles of the Wafer-ash: the Common Hoptree, which I have seen nowhere else but in a field guide, whereupon I said, 'that's the stuff from Point Pelee'...it's still there, still doing its Hoptree thing, without regard for the life I've lived in the interim. The park marks the northern limit of its range, but it seemed just another component of the ecosystem, along with the flowering Sumac and the trailing vines, the Sunflowers and the Scouring Rushes, known for their ancient lineage.



And there were birds, as advertised. A few in the forest, but more on a tract that still bore the marks of its years as a farmstead and orchard. The biome is reasserting itself, without nostalgia, and the altered circumstances create a marginal zone of mixed habitat which attracts a wide variety of species. Warblers were there, along with Vireos and Orioles, Waxwings and Flycatchers, and more Hummingbirds than I'd seen in Central Park in a year. A walk through the Marsh, and a trip to the Tip filled out the day, adding a few shorebirds to the mix, along with Wood Duck and Swamp Sparrow. Overall, I saw about forty species of birds. Not a huge total, (migration is just beginning), but good by my standards. By dusk, I was exhausted



I had no trouble finding a motel. A little work might have found one cheaper, but not much closer to the park, and hey, the exchange rate is good on the American Dollar, so it was Quality Inn for me. The food was well meant, and cheerily served, but the local perch deserved better than the heavy batter frying; and the mushy vegetables were undeserving altogether. The best thing was the Pelee Island wine. The islands of Lake Erie are hospitable to grapes (the park is tangled with the wild vines) and the small local wine industry is a long-standing point of pride in the vicinity. The wine is not great, but it's the sort of thing that is best at the source, and at that point, Pelee Pinot Noir tasted pretty good to me.



The next day dawned a little different.

No longer overpowered by the sheer existential abundance, I found everything more freighted with remembrance and correspondences. I began to feel a pressure to accomplish whatever it was I'd come there for, though I wasn't altogether sure exactly what that was. I felt irresponsible for abandoning the family scene, and anxious about the duties awaiting my return.



Still, the day was fair, and the black flies fewer, and there came a moment when I did have the sort of birding experience that I was looking for. I was turning back, after an uneventful visit to the Tip, finding fewer shorebirds than the day before. The Tip is a tapering tongue of beach, shorter than it once was, maybe a quarter mile from where the trees stop to where the country stops. As I neared the clump of Hackberry trees that marked the end (or beginning) of the forest zone, I caught a quick glimpse of a flight of small birds, from the north. Presently, they were all around me. I was in the midst of a little flock of Warblers which veritably seethed through the foliage. Magnolia, Palm, Pine, Black-throated Blue, and my first male Cape May Warblers were all there at once, flitting in spiral dance around the limbs and through the tree tops at the very end of Carolinian Canada.



This little tale may not excite seasoned bird watchers, but for me it was a powerful event. I worked assiduously to obtain good views and firm IDs for birds I hadn't seen in Fall plumage. By the time the flurry subsided (why didn't I see where they went?), I felt like
I'd had a proper Point Pelee experience. I'd spent an unintended hour in the ecstasy of observation. The afternoon was lengthening, and it was time to think of leaving.



It was then that nostalgia finally gripped me.

For the first time on the trip, I felt truly compelled.

I felt that it was crucial, in some final gesture towards the past, for me to take a swim.

Swimming was ostensibly the reason we went to Pelee, those Sundays long ago. I enjoyed all it's aspects, but if I had to explain what we did on the weekend, I'd say 'we went to the beach'.

I don't swim often these days, and hadn't particularly planned on it there,

but I felt compelled to enter into Lake Erie,

and I somehow felt that I was doing it for my father.



The lake is vast. You cannot see the other shore. Excepting the fresh water, you might be at the ocean. As a child, it was the only Ocean that I knew. Now there I was again; changing in the empty booth; feeling the flat, warm stones of the beach beneath my feet; and then the cooler sand, as I stepped into the ever lapping waters.



It felt good.

The bottom was nice and sandy, I walked out further, till I was up to my neck, barely bobbing.

Something relaxed in me there, immersed in Lake Erie.

I let go, for a moment, of the thing that keeps me and my father from finding a way to embrace his death together.

I let go of something which I need, just to keep myself together from day to day,

but which impinges, nonetheless.

I looked into the west, and saw the lowering sun poured out, silver white upon the endless liquid surface.

I thought of my father,

and I found myself sobbing,

there, in the midst of Lake Erie,

salt water into fresh,

for the sake of my father.



He always swam there. I still remember his pale, round back, bobbing in the green water, attracting black flies that he slapped at.

And I think how much of what gives me pleasure I learned from him, on those outings, not a thing he told me, but an attitude towards the World, which he taught by example.

But I hold myself a little straighter, that my back not grow rounder,

as his has.

And I see my hands, wrinkling in the transparent water,

and see in them his aged hands, hanging limply.

And I cry,


Daddy

Daddy

Daddy

I love you


And I am mourning him even now, before he dies.



And maybe that's as should be.

We as a culture, despite our pieties, have little means for dealing with Death.

We wait, as they say, till too late.

When a life is well lived, as my father's has been, we should not proscribe the contemplation of its ending, as we do in countless subtle ways.

But who am I to say so, a sobbing child, who yet has time to live?

Ask your churchmen, or your gurus, but there is little guidance that applies; each of us must find the way ourselves.

And that way is found beyond ourselves.



I moved deeper into the water, to where I could not touch the bottom. I lost my foundation, and I floated.

And finally I submerged,

my head beneath the water.

Part baptism,

part drowning.

Disappearing into something larger.


And I prayed for my father, such as I know how.

Ask your church how it's done,

for my part, prayer always becomes a process of elimination,

and what can you really ask for?

I always wind up praying for God, not to God.

That God should have the strength to hold it all together,

and bring all things to culmination,

our lives a little thing among them.

You cannot pray for someone to live forever.

That he may have the strength to face the passage,

and not suffer too much in it,

that is what I pray for.

For my father, and for me.

For all of us.



And all for Love.

While he moves toward the sunset,

and I return to shore,

I realize that the love I bear my father is not out of respect, or duty,

or even affection.

It's not something I dispense at will.

Love is not something that we have, or that we do to others.

But it is through our relationships with others, and with the fragments of this World, that we may come to know Love, which is a way of embracing something more than oneself.

Love is as an Ocean that subsumes us all, and will unite us, if we but recognize it, transparent all around.



A hackneyed metaphor, no doubt.

No less than when they say that God is Love.

And no less true.

It is an index of my fathers condition that he, never a religious man, has in the last few years taken up churchgoing.

Just what it does for him is not completely clear, but it seems to please him.

There they talk of God the Father,

and how, out of nothing, He gave us all.

And that's really what my father did for me,

no more than any father should do

no less than life demands.



I stood on the shore,

damp, and beginning to shiver.

I'd done what I'd come to do.

These, my labors,

this, my Holiday.