each with his own delusions

families afloat on a motherfuckin boat

japhs with someone else’s dog that he imagined was his own

The last tether to the outside world was severed when Japhy used the remaining 3% of my phone’s battery to watch Titanic conspiracy theories in the tent on Raccoon Island. We had a solar charger that ran our fancy new string lights, but didn’t realize it took 14 hours of sun to charge. Some time around the part where the YT Kids video laid out the “evidence” that a German u-boat had blasted the hull of the Titanic, the phone blinked off. Maybe there was counter-evidence. We would never know.

We camped for five days and four nights on the island in upstate New York with our friends Sara and Dan, who have a pontoon boat. We call it Raccoon Island because it is home to a shameless population of raccoons who leave paw prints all over the picnic tables in the night and can be heard chewing on your beer cans if you don’t put the recycling into a racoon-proof tub. That said, I can’t even be angry at them, given their outfits. The eye mask! The stripes! One evening when it was barely dark, a raccoon tried to go into our tent. I yelled, “Hey! Git!” and he looked at me with his dark eyes, like, ah shit, I was told this disguise would make me invisible.

fuck

Days on Lake George are amazing. You can start drinking as early as you like, dip as often as you like, cast off from the dock to find somewhere to jump off a cliff, or pick up additional friends. Something about motoring over a lake subdues kids. They like to crouch under the lip of the bow in their lifejackets, letting the wind pummel their foreheads.

Personally, I love doing my knots. Sailing knots are special because they are incredibly strong when force is applied to the ropes, but also easy to undo. You “break the back” of a bowline to undo it, finding that the loops uncoil without much fuss. When you pull up to a dock, you can do a neat stack of half-hitches to cast on, and finger-knit the ends to make a quick-release braid. My dad taught me a lot of these. Noodles insists that my knots are “too fussy” and prefers to use his instincts to tie up in a noodly scribble that has no beginning or end. Men always want to comment on your knots.

One of the first days camping was July 4, and we had brought oysters to shuck for lunch. Our friends Molly and Norm joined us on the island with their kids, providing us with critical mass for the children to break off entirely into their own tribe. They were on the next campsite sparring with foam swords and shields, and the adults were left to drink wine.

I offered Norm an oyster on the half shell. He’s a great cook. “One of my sister’s friends died from an off oyster,” he said, “but thank you.”

“I’ll have two,” replied his wife, Molly, the hero of this story.

Norm thought I could do fewer hitches in my cast-on, and instead just wrap the rope around the post a few times for tension.

“How do you like my canopy,” I asked, pointing at the shade I had strung up over the camp kitchen with taut stays.

“It’s good,” he said.

Dan got out his campfire bagpipes—a smaller, quieter set of pipes than your regular—and sat in his rocker piping away as everyone swam. There are two competing instincts when you hear pipes: on the one hand, they’re relaxing, like a sound bath rolling over the hills and around the loch, but also they make you want to do a jig. The highlander in you awakens and your legs begin to jump and hop.

I could see Scout in the hammock near the water, tearing through another graphic novel. FINISHED, she’ll say. FINISHED ANOTHER. She likes to make a point of it: I’M BUSY READING. I want her to read a novel-novel like The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, or One Mixed-up Night, or Firecracker, but telling her to read something is the best way to ensure she won’t.

We headed out to see the fireworks at night by Lake George village in the south. Japhs wanted to know if the Sea Cow—this boat—could sink. Could it snap in two? No, we said. No. There was a black hole in the side of the Titanic, he said, life jacket up around his ears, Scientific evidence showed it.

The fireworks sounded like cannons on the lake, bouncing off the hills, and we let ourselves imagine the Revolutionary War, Daniel Day Lewis running through the brush and the raccoons minding their own business on the island. Scout kept saying “It’s so beautifullll!” because her sensitive soul is cellophane thin and feels all the world’s beauty. Once the show was over, and the last spat-spat-spat of fireworks had faded over the water, every boat on the lake barped its horn in a symphony. We turned in the darkness and rode as a flotilla back up to our island across choppy waters, the kids by now curled into sleepy barnacles in the cockpit.

During the days, M would be in the water any time anyone else was. She bobbed about in her pink and purple floaties, shrieking like a lily pad as waves rolled in. Janet, are you going to swim? She’d ask when we were on dry land. We’d get wet to get dry, to get wet. I’d float saggy-titted in the cool water, moving just enough to stay afloat. The big paddle-steamers on Lake George would chug past our dock every couple of hours, and if you positioned yourself right and did the truck-horn gesture, they’d bleat at you. This was the entire agenda of a day on the lake. Parenting styles congealed into something low-lift and communal. Food became a fossick for anything you could find in the bins or coolers. A walk to drop the rubbish at the parks dump-house became an adventure. The kids were allowed to roam and explore, heading off with Import. You did a jig without fighting it. Tanties were had, but where could a child storm off to? They were stuck on the island.

By day four, we got too lazy even to cook hotdogs over a fire, and decided to order food from an onshore restaurant with a dock. When we motored in, there was a 17yo deckhand there to help us cruise in cleanly and tie up. He took the stern-line and I hopped off to tie up the bow.

“Perfect job,” the boy said to me, nodding at my hitches on the post.

“OH,” I said. “THANK YOU,” looking to see if Noodles was paying attention.

It didn’t even matter whether the chips were hot or what. That meal was going to taste amazing after this.

What if we just never left the island, said someone. We could fish (the kids had caught the same poor fish three times), eat wild blackberries, purchase beer from the parks office. Why DID we have to go home? We asked, the last of the ice in the coolers seeping into the dirt.

So we stayed forever.

postscript: we did in fact go back two weeks later, because everyone had the back-on-land blues.

ahoy to sexy knot guy

perry_trees

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what we (japhy) created at art camp

we were invited to an “artist showcase” on the Friday at 3 p.m., and japhs had been hard at work

ah, excellent

yes, great work

there were many more of these. Scout did a screen-printing camp, but her instructor didn’t seem very much fun. What’s the point! DELIGHT IN MY CHILDREN, PLEASE.

goodies

time to re-read Haley Mlotek’s “Against August”:

There is something off about August. This part of the summer season brings about an atmospheric unease. The long light stops feeling languorous and starts to seem like it’s just a way of putting off the night. There is no position of the earth in relation to the sun that comes as a relief. Insomnia arrives in August; bedsheets become heavy under humidity. No good habits are possible in August, much less good decisions.

I really enjoyed Attachments by Lucas Mann, which goes deep into fatherhood (MEN I AM SORRY I EVER DOUBTED YE), from body image issues to futzy dad tropes to men’s wary participation in the parenting discourse—it’s sweet and smart. Get it.

these scam texts rounded up by

Max Read

are such poetry:

“I got snipped” by Joseph Earl Thomas, whose book Sink I shall read.

Also finished Western Lane by Chetna Maroo, a really lovely and quite funny book about three sisters and their squash-happy father after their mother has died. I say finished, because my friend Matt says I never finish anything, which is only sometimes true.

Listening: I heard this great Eddie Vedder cover of The Beat’s “Save It For Later.” which was apparently in The Bear but I was prob too bored to notice, and it reminded me how good the original is.

July ground me to a pulp but did involve two fun assignments I’m excited to share soon!