A Story That Sticks
Searching for Graves and the Ferryman's "Sad Complaint"
Our goal is simple: we want our country to flourish. Our dilemma is simple: we cannot tell our people a story that sticks.
Barry Lopez, Resistance
Early afternoon, Presidents Day, I’m in the waiting room of the Heart and Vascular Institute. After chest pains that began in the autumn—which could have been attributed to “silent acid reflux,” as my regular doctor suggested, or just stress from my new job as a high school teacher—I was given an appointment here for a consultation.
I’m reading the new issue of Harper’s when the nurse comes to fetch me. I’m given a brief EKG that the cardiologist mulls over. Because of family history, he says—my mother had congestive heart failure and a pacemaker, and my father had open heart surgery when he was about my age—he wants me to have a CT scan, a far more modern way to get data, he assures me, than the traditional stress test, which he makes out to be somewhat archaic and ultimately inconclusive. Then, of course, there’s my cholesterol levels.
When he listens to my chest through his stethoscope, I want to apologize for the bronchitis I’m still getting over. With his scope to my neck, he tells me he detects a slight murmur.
When I get home, I work a bit on my writing. I look at the news, which only demoralizes me. Depressed and tired, I take a nap. I don’t lie down long. When I get up, I go for a walk in the cold. Where the last snow is melting, bits of garbage appear, plastic cups, a chip wrapper, a crushed beer can. Ice drips from the cars along the curb, looking like the bars of a cage, locking the fenders to the street.
Now I’m on the couch, drinking jasmine tea from one of the porcelain mugs I took from my father’s house after he died. I’m listening to the washing machine make uncomfortable banging noises, which always makes me worry, will this be another expense? Can I absorb it?
I think about the visit to the cardiologist today, which will cost me, out-of-pocket, more than $300. When I see the bill pending for the CT scan, it’s another $500. My HSA card will cover some but not all of that.
I’m thinking about what looks like the inevitable shutdown of the U.S. Department of Education, an institution that offers—or offered before court cases brought it to a stop—the possibility of relief to my ballooning student loan debt. I’m seeing news of the firings of U.S. government officials and employees across the country, and what clings to me is the post of one mid-level manager: “…one of our probationary staff who was terminated committed suicide. We were called into a Teams meeting and everyone just cried. It was all too much.”
In the midst of all this, how do I continue writing? And what do I write?
I’m fifty-three years old, a single father, a high school teacher. I’m also a writer and a photographer. I’ve applied for two grants this year, both to fund a flight to Barcelona for the Experimental Photography Festival in July. Now the whole endeavor, given the chaos in the Federal Aviation Administration and recent plane crashes, makes me uneasy.
Everything going on in the media, as The Guardian defined it, is “sanewashing.” This would account for my own behavior, as well; all of us everywhere, it seems to me, are trying to maintain a sense of normalcy. At all costs, especially to our mental health, we fight to hold onto some sense of order, even in the clear sonic boom of the slow-motion implosion of our country, our culture, and truly, our dreams. Our futures.
My friend, the photographer Shachaf Polakow, showed me an article on his phone, “Guardian Media Group announces strategic partnership with OpenAI.” He took this to be a kind of end.
So it is that in the past few days I found myself writing about the Connecticut River. Then the Farmington River, which once had a ferry that made use of a single rope and a canoe. And finally, I began writing about Luke Hill, the first ancestor of mine to bear that surname, at least in the records we know of.
I muddled my way through language and memory. It led me, perhaps unsurprisingly, to begin writing about my father. I want, despite everything, to offer some form of hope. I’m trying to find a story that sticks.
This week I wrote a sentence:
“When he was my age, give or take, my father went searching for graves.”
This, I decided, could be the first sentence of my book.
It came after a week and more of fiddling with words and ideas and settings. I began by writing about the Connecticut River, its history in regard to not only the explorers who “discovered” it but the native peoples that lived along its banks. Then I wrote about the Farmington River, which empties into the Connecticut at Windsor. I wrote about Luke Hill, who was a ferryman on the Farmington in two places.
I wrote about my father’s travels in 2002, when he went looking for the gravesites of three ancestors, each being the earliest grave markers for the Hill’s on my family line. He went east to see Abraham’s grave in Carmel, New York, on the far side of the Hudson River. He went north, nearly to the shore of Lake Ontario, to see the grave of Ferris, buried at Lewis Corners on a country road. Then he went west to Keuka Lake to see the grave of Harsey, buried on North Urbana Hill, in what looks to be a neglected country cemetery a mile above the lake.
Probing for an opening into my book’s preface, I sketched a profile of the Bath National Cemetery, where he’s buried. I remembered—in 2010, I believe, when I had stayed with my father a short time on my way to an artist residency in Vermont—that he had driven me west on the Southern Tier Expressway and pointed out, speeding by on the freeway, the hillside where he’d purchased his grave.
It was in this surge of writing that I came upon that sentence. And I realized that in that first decade of the new century, when he was the age I was now, my father was looking for numerous graves: those of the past, of his ancestors, and ultimately his own.
Perhaps he stood on a threshold that I haven’t yet fully come to. If I’m remembering right, then from the moment he showed me his gravesite to the time he died was about four years. I can’t say I’ve come to that yet, though when I’m waiting in the hospital for the cardiologist, looking around at all the people in the waiting room, all older than me, I begin to see where I’m headed.
If I can secure the funding, and the time, I want to travel to the northeast and follow these paths for myself. I’d especially love to do that this summer. I want to go to Windsor, to stand on the Palisado Avenue bridge above the Farmington, from which I’ll be able to see where Luke Hill operated his ferry. I can see the graves throughout New York my father visited for myself.
And from this, I hope, I can begin to craft a story that sticks. Who are we? Who are we as a people? This history: what does it matter, and what can it mean?
There is a salve to writing, as well. In all my years of reading the work of Viktor Frankl, the author of Man’s Search for Meaning, and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the author of Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, I’ve seen that, in the past few months, despite the news, while I write, I elevate for a moment above the dread.
I can release myself from the anxiety that comes from the daily onslaught of news. I can escape, for a time, my own mortality, the thoughts of a future where any sense of traditional retirement is obliterated. Whatever happens, I can only work now. For today.
My friend, a Buddhist scholar, reminds me, No one knows what will happen. Prediction is a capacity beyond us, our forecasts all pretensions. So I carry on.
When he had taken over the ferry at Windsor, Luke Hill and his wife, Mary Hout, came before the town court on April 27, 1667, to complain. He was being paid an annual salary of £12 to keep the ferry. The Town Acts record that, Luke Hill made a sad complaint that if the towne would not ad to the sume they had set him for keping the fery at the former meeting he must leave the fery and his wife came in and sadly bemoned the inconvenience we are upon it was voted that they would ade the action £3 as it was before.
The one thing we learn of our ancestors, if given the records, is that they suffered much like us. I don’t know that this puts me at ease as much as I’d like, but it’s a place to stand.
As I write my book, and these posts, I think of myself as that ferryman. I hope these stories will carry me—and you—over the divide.
Hope your tests come back OK.