Looking Across at a Pond

For the first time in a life full of fleeting thoughts, he considered the geometry of sight lines in relation to accumulating snow.

He could still see the pond - the actual water - and he wondered how long it would be before the snow on the hill between the window and the pond would become too high for him to see anything of the pond beside the brown stalks of cattails on the far side.

He wanted to dedicate his night to this thought.

To pour a whisky and watch the snow and the clock and predict the minute when he would lose sight of the black water. It would be after the sunset, no doubt, but would it be before the the moment when the cattails lost their autumn brown color and turned to silver for an hour before becoming a texture of darkness.

To fill the in between minutes with reflections about his life. Time to long and scratch his beard. To read Chekhov by the window, or no - Tolstoy - at the speed of snow accumulation there would be time for Tolstoy. To breath deep through his nose, look up to the sky, and trace the constellations in the silent moments between his thoughts.

He looked at the sky, but stars weren’t visible yet. His eyes refocused on a tree.

He'd considered sight lines and trees. He had an old flame that lived near the first radio tower built in the county- in the winter, he could see it from his upstairs window. (Not to go full Gatsby, but..) Even from 8 miles away, he could pick out it's blinking light - it's flash would interrupt him with red thoughts of her.

On May 9th, the canopy of the brown maple in front of his house became thick enough to block the light. (The year before, it had been April 18th, but a spring snow storm bent a branch and for one night he could see the tower.) The tree usually kept it's leaves into late January, so he hadn't marked the date this year.

Reality is defined by sight lines. The magic of winter, like the magic of trees, comes from slowly bending them.

Just then, his wife came down the stairs. Their son was finally sleeping peacefully. She sat on the couch, took out her phone, and asked him to bring her some of her candy.

He asked if she wanted a drink; she only wanted seltzer. He got the candy and the seltzer and sat down next to her.

She remarked about the snow, mostly to share the fear that it would stick to the roads and make their drive more dangerous. He looked out. From the couch, he couldn't see the pond. They turned on the TV and he rubbed her feet.

The thought began to die.

They watched shark tank on the TV. In their years together they developed a perfect way of talking to each other during a show. Inserting jokes and opinions without ruining the narrative or annoying each other. During commercials they looked at their phones. Every few minutes, they showed each other pictures and videos of their son.

This had become what was most important. As much as their tired life guided them apart, these moments at the end of each day brought their souls close together again. Just looking at photos and videos of their son, always prefaced by an exaggerated pronunciation of the month, and then impersonating his little voice and his newest words. This ritual, their daily production of shared joy. Love.

They went up to bed, brushing their teeth and preparing for sleep quietly so not to wake their son. They eased into the bedroom and then the bed by phone light. Their son stirred in the crib but remained asleep. Normally he had his own room, but they were staying in her parent's second property in the mountains.

As he relaxed his mind, he thought one more time about the snowfall and the pond. He wondered how much the snow had accumulated on the hill. He was imagining it when his wife asked him to get her a cup of water. They were at altitude, her head hurt, and her mouth was dry.

He went downstairs to get the water. But before turning back up, he went over to the window - where he had been standing earlier, watching the snow and contemplating the lines of sight.

He looked out towards the pond. He couldn't see the water or the cattails, but he couldn't be sure if it was the result of snow accumulation changing the angles or just the darkness. Nothing was visible between the top of the hill and the lights from the houses on the other side.

He watched the snow fall. The snow itself was visible only in the final moments of falling. Any snowflakes more than two feet off the ground were an invisible element, additional density in the darkness.

He wondered how much meaning and ultimately how much of someone's identity came from the potential in all of the different sight lines in our field of vision. And how in the dark, without the sun's infinity of visible angles and distant reference points, the individual lost some sense of who they were. Within civilization, the fear of the dark is more of an existential fear than a survival instinct.

He took the water back upstairs and fell asleep wondering how far his son could see, and what it would mean to a 17 month old to fill his field of vision with a snowy field, a silent pond, dried out cattails and a steady snow.

In the morning, holding his son and saying simple, silly phrases for his son to repeat, he stood by the window and looked out. The snow had stopped. None of the pond was visible over the hill. He could only see the tops of the cattails. He had missed his moment.

He began to turn on himself. The whole thing started to dry out. The thought seemed so stupid and small and lonely. That he had fabricated significance, invented meaning; a whole thing about having the chance to experience a significant moment when the perceived world changes. It was romanticized mindlessness. The world outside the window was just a golf course. The pond was a water hazard on the second hole. For drainage, the hill was made of sand and then covered in sod after the mountain was bulldozed. It was all so artificial.

The gurgle of an unfamiliar coffee machine took him away from the window.

His wife came downstairs, bringing with her the immense hurry to clean the house and drive back down, to beat the traffic and make it home before nap time.

A stick broke inside of him. He understood that he was losing the freedom of solitary thought and useless contemplation. He knew it was part of inevitable and beautiful loss of self that comes with being a father.

But he wasn’t willing to lose this part of his identity by stepping into his wife’s anxiety. Not this morning. Her stress made him resentful, the thought transformed again, from artificial, to hopeless, and so he clung to it.

He self-declared that he would not abandon the part of himself that chased random and useless lines of thinking. Not this weekend. He made a plan to prolong his ideas about identity and the geometry of the field of vision and how the changing lines of sight altered the nature of reality. To maintain this part of his individuality, no matter how useless, for just a little bit longer.

He knew they would be back up there in two weeks. A getaway to celebrate his father-in-law's birthday. He made a plan to mark this sight line so that he could come back to it and think about how the world changed between this moment and that. He needed to document the angles of the current field of vision.

While cleaning the counters he pocketed a purple ribbon that had been wrapped around a chocolate sampler box. With the vacuum running and his wife upstairs, he stood in the spot by the window, held his phone at eye level and took a picture.

Then he vacuumed the upstairs, cleaned the toilets and emptied the trash cans, taking care to  throw away the coffee grounds this time. He packed the trash in the car on top of their luggage and the cooler of food.

The car ride home was silent. The noiselessness intensified the smell of their trash and the cold, dank sensation coming from the bottom of his jeans. His wife wouldn’t talk to him, but her anger still leaked out in her exhalations – the way methane will always bubble out of a swamp.

He felt the effect of it. She wanted him to fill the silence with guilt, and to hurt for having had wronged her. He felt those feelings, but right next to them, like cars in the same traffic, he felt the hollowness and warmth of smugness and victory. He turned on his blinker and thought of the moment when he stood on the hill and looked back across the pond he’d crossed twice. When he unzipped his jacket and joyfully filled his lungs with a breath frosted air.  He smiled to himself and looked over his shoulder to change lanes.

After loading the car, without telling his wife, he walked around the back of the house towards the pond. It wouldn’t take him long. He only had to jog around to the far side of the water, push through some cattails, tie the ribbon around the cattail, right where, in the photograph of his sight line, it intersected with the hill.

The snow was deep and softer than he imagined, and as he climbed the hill he sunk into the snow. It took him longer than expected to get to the top of the hill; his wife must have seen him.  

She yelled at him from the back porch. She was holding their son and her voice was vicious and straining with surprise and disbelief.

He told her to wait one minute and then climbed down the hill. He had originally planned on jogging around the pond, but he felt suddenly childish and his heart rate was rushed by his wife’s anger.  He decided, to save time, to cross the pond.

He came down the hill to near edge of the water hazard. The mud at the base of the cattails was frozen in solid ridges that he could feel through his shoes. The stalks were so dry that they collapsed when his foot touched them. The pond looked like it was frozen solid, and even if it wasn’t it was a golf pond and only a few feet deep.  

He heard his wife scream again and then heard the door close and then it was quiet. He almost turned back. He should have. He pulled out his phone and looked at the picture. He made a mental note of which cattail he would need to tie the ribbon to, and then took his first sliding step out onto the ice.