Creek Running North

My father thought I was fun to be with, until I turned eight. He said that to an ex-girlfriend of mine one day in an attempt at levity. She smiled thinly, but was secretly horrified. I thought it was funny. Or at least as funny as Dad ever gets. It’s true that my relationship with my family changed when I was eight. Starting that year, I spent nine-tenths of my waking hours either at school or commuting. A lot of people were cast adrift from their families in September 1968, and I was one of them. I was just a little younger than my cohort. My family became housemates. I rarely saw them.

There was deeper truth to Dad’s joke. He’s far more comfortable with little kids than with bigger ones. I’ve inherited that preference to some degree. The same went for Dad’s father, or so I’ve heard. He died a few days after my seventh birthday, so I never had to face being told I was too old to clamber onto his Barcaloungered lap. My grandfather died of multiple myeloma, a particularly insidious form of cancer that is far more treatable now than it was in 1967. A few more years, and thalidomide might have let Grandpa live long enough to make our relationship more complex.

On January 20, 1967, my father came into my room very early in the morning to give me the news. “Oh, no,” I said. That was the depth of my grief. This kind of thing was new to me. I knew what death was, having poked my share of road-killed cats with sticks, but at seven was too young for the full weight of the loss of my grandfather to hit me. I went off to my first grade class that morning, peculiarly unaffected. At 32, my father was, quite likely, also too young for the full weight of his loss to completely register. I don’t know if he drove down to Cornell that morning to go to work on his mainframes, but I’m betting he did. The morning his mother died, in 1999, he took the call and then went on his usual Saturday shopping trip to the big box store. Coming out of the parking lot, an SUV slammed into his van at highway speed. He was uninjured, aside from airbag burns. His van needed some body and frame work. “Why the hell did you go out driving the morning you mother died?” I yelled at him on the telephone that day. “I was fine,” he said. “The SUV ran a red light.”

My father can go for months, years without talking to his kids. This isn’t out of lack of feeling, but more a misplaced desire not to intrude. It’s a family tradition. Get a roomful of Clarkes together, especially if they haven’t seen one another for a few months, and the silence can be deafening. My father told me once of coming home from college for the first time, getting into Geneva at some ungodly early morning hour, and riding the ten miles home in silence with his father. “There was no need for us to talk about anything,” he told me once. “Why waste time talking?” This is not precisely a majority opinion in our little section of the family. But we don’t talk about it much.

My grandfather was one letter away from being a famous writer: his name was Arthur D. Clarke. Were he born in 1969 instead of 1909, he might have succumbed to talk therapy. He was what is now referred to as “Adult Child of Alcoholic.” My great-grandfather was, by all accounts (one, to be precise, told me by my father) a drunkard and a borderline failure. He ran a store in the small town of Gorham, NY for some time, relying on my grandfather to keep his business afloat. Once my father asked his grandfather if he could have a drink of that water. My great grandfather chuckled to his friends sitting around on stumps behind the barn, and handed him the mason jar. ”Sure, said Great Grandpa. You can have a drink of this water.” Dad tilted the jar to his lips, and the gin made his mouth feel aflame. He doubled over, retching, as the old farts laughed themselves silly.

My grandfather never touched a drop of liquor, so far as I know. My dad strayed a bit from abstemiousness. After his divorce, he bought three or four bottles of hard liquor and one of Napoleon brandy, and stuck them in his kitchen broom closet. He drank maybe an eighth of the vodka, and the rest stayed essentially untouched for a year or so. Finally, thoughtfully, fulfilling my filial duty to be helpful to my father, I finished them off for him. Some things skip more than one generation.

For whatever reason, parental alcoholism or early twentieth century rural mores or depression or individual disposition, my grandfather was a silent man. My grandmother once told us that he went for several months, at one point, without saying a word to her. No argument, no anger, just silence. I remember him opening up to his grandchildren. That memory may be wishful thinking on my part. He was my closest confidante in those days, but what does a five-year old have to confide? I spent a lot of time in his lap, but I mainly remember laughing with him as the roadrunner outsmarted the stupid coyote once again. I no longer remember a single conversation with him, though I have clear memories of conversations with other family members that took place years before he died. We may never have talked about anything.

My father, though taciturn enough to drive his children nuts, is nonetheless more voluble than his father by an order of magnitude. He never intrudes by calling me, but if I call him, he’ll chat until I hang up. Before I became uninteresting on my eighth birthday, he and I worked together on any number of projects. The month my grandfather died, Dad spent a probably very large number of tedious hours winding copper wire around a small cylinder, making the tuning coil for the crystal radio kit he’d bought me that Christmas. He was taking a correspondence course in electronics that year. I followed him in the workbooks, two or three volumes behind. I learned how to read the color codes on resistors, then lost interest somewhere between the capacitor chapter and the diode chapter.  My father soldered together a kit stereo — still called, in those days, a “hi-fi” — and he used it until the mid-1980s.

I laid upstairs in my room one winter evening a month or so after Grandpa Clarke died, listening through a tiny earphone to the completed crystal radio. My father asked me whether the radio worked. I told him I had just listened to a biography of Robert Goddard on the Voice of America. He frowned. “That’s not supposed to be a shortwave radio!” He took it back and “fixed” it, brought the resulting AM radio back up to my room with his old amplifier. I much preferred the shortwave. I read instead; Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge and comics and high school science texts. Two or three years later, my father gave me another shortwave. 

The last time I went back to visit my father was in 1999. We drove to the Finger Lakes to visit a few relatives.  At my request, he drove me around to a few different houses he’d lived in as a kid. My grandfather was, for most of his adult life, a tenant farmer, and quitting a job often meant moving out of the house his landlord owned. We drove past one place, a nice small clapboard on the edge of a tiny hamlet. Dad told me that they’d lived there for a time, and one day my grandmother looked up and saw her husband walking back from the fields he worked outside town. There was something she recognized in his posture, I guess, in the vigor of his stride or perhaps it was the way the dark clouds swirled ominously behind him. She turned to her kids. “Start packing,” she said.

My dad went away to college. He came home for the summer. He went out looking for summer jobs. One potential employer looked at him with a cocked eye. “You’re Artie Clarke’s boy, aren’t you?” Dad was a little taken aback. “Did he tell you I was gonna come talk to you?” “Hell,” said the man. “I could tell a mile away, from the way you walk!”

That was half a mile from the house where I’d clambered into Artie Clarke’s lap. My aunt and uncle still live there. Another house, a red brick house in Seneca Castle, was visible from a road I’ve traveled down probably five thousand times. All my life until age 20 we’d been driving past some of these places, and never once had Dad driven the eighth-mile out of the way to point them out. The motel in Geneva that I could draw from memory, which I’d been watching since I was old enough to hold my head up? The small house in front of it was a great uncle’s. They’d wanted to buy him out, and he said no, so they built around him. Family roots a mile deep in the Flint Creek watershed, second-cousins all over and marks on the landscape, and I was told none of it until I asked just before turning 40.

I could have asked as a child. I may well have. I am still learning that my father’s silence does not always signify anger, a lesson I would have denied heatedly at age ten. I gave up asking him questions long before then. A few years later, I gave up talking to him at all, except in a voice raised at some imagined slight. When I was thirteen he and I broke up a section of cracked concrete sidewalk with sledgehammers, used the rubble as filler and poured a new walk. A utility truck drove up onto it two months later and cracked it again. A day later, I went out there with the sledgehammer and started breaking it up again. Dad was out there like a rocket.
“What are you doing?”
“I just thought...”
“You weren’t thinking! This is not what I wanted you to do! Use your damn brain for once! What’s wrong with you?”

He poured the second iteration on his own.

About twenty years later he apologized. He’d had a bad day and took it out on me, knew I was only trying to be helpful, and was annoyed above all that he’d done a slipshod job on pouring the slab in the first place. He’d meant to apologize for some time. I’d forgotten the incident almost entirely, remembering only the productive first phase of the project.

In the Gorham cemetery in 1999, we visited the graves of my grandparents, the flowers still intact from my grandmother’s funeral. Near them, the tombstones of my great grandparents. One close among them in alabaster, a little lamb atop it: for my poor sweet cousin Carol, who died before the advent of seat belts and car seats.

Surrounding them, the tombs of strangers, people I’d never met nor heard of. Many of them shared my last name. I didn’t count.

Driving back to my father’s house that evening, I saw a red-tailed hawk silhouetted against a deep red sky. The sun had slid toward the western horizon, landed on southern Canada. We crossed a bridge over the Genesee River.

Two decades in California had estranged me from the Western New York landscape. Five days back had not dispelled the oddity. For the first time, I felt strongly that New York was no longer home.

“Dad, am I imagining that there are a lot more hawks here now than when I lived here?”

We drove in silence along Route 20 for a mile, then two. Route 5 peeled off toward Caledonia. Silver maples reflected red sky from their leaves’ shiny undersides. The road looped and soared over glacial hills. Tires thumped against the frost-heaved cracks in the pavement. We drove this road a lot when I was small, visiting relatives after we’d moved to Buffalo, and this time of day meant heading home and school tomorrow. My father dimmed his brights for an oncoming car, then another.

We were almost to Pavilion when he spoke.

“I don’t know,” he said.