Navigating

We sat around the kitchen table in Maryland late one autumn night, drinking tea while we debated. My brother and his wife Sarah wanted to go before the leaves turned, but I was reluctant to travel when an avalanche of work remained to sift through––house repairs, medical paperwork, so many tasks unfinished. I drained my cup and finally said, partly because I wanted to get to bed, “Fine, let’s do it.” Peter and Sarah beamed at me and patted me on the shoulder as if I had been a very good child.

October came, and my brother bought airplane tickets for all of us with his frequent flyer miles, and we took Dad to Vermont. Peter rented a Lincoln Town Car at the Burlington airport, and we drove east toward Stowe in comfort, gazing out the windows at covered bridges and old barns, trees bursting magnificently crimson and yellow. Herds of cows and church spires dotted the hills like designs on a quilt.

Arriving in New England so quickly was disorienting without the familiar landmarks of the long drive of my childhood summers; the diners where my parents bought us maple syrup candy, the pungent aromas of pine trees and skunk. My family had driven up to Thompson’s Point each June in the white station wagon. Peter and I snoozed comfortably amidst blankets and pillows on a mattress in the back, while my parents chatted and sipped black coffee from paper cups, fishing in the glove compartment for toll booth quarters or another pack of cigarettes.

“Dad will love Jim’s house,” my brother said from the driver’s seat, glancing at me in the rear-view mirror before looking back at the road. His loose plan was to spend a couple of days at a vacation lodge belonging to one of his clients, then take Dad back to Thompson’s Point for his last visit. Sarah buttoned her cardigan against the sudden cool of late afternoon.

“I hope your father’s warm enough back there,” she said.

Moot point. My father was beyond such concerns. He––or rather, the cardboard box containing his earthly remains––was safely ensconced in the bottom of my carry-on bag. Peter and Sarah kept addressing his ashes in the back seat as if he were an enthusiastic participant on our trip. We’d already stopped at an overpriced inn, at my brother’s insistence, for pumpkin pie and mochas (“Dad loves pie!”) and lost another hour touring Ben and Jerry’s ice cream factory (“He’s totally into Ben and Jerry’s. Trust me!”) I wondered if Dad was getting an unpleasant sugar rush by now. He’d never been a big dessert eater.

The fall weather was exhilarating, the air turning crisp as the sun slipped behind the mountains, spilling a rich burnt orange glow over the countryside. But I felt annoyed and restless in the car, and the feeling didn’t subside once we’d arrived in Stowe at the borrowed lodge. The huge house was luxuriously appointed with oil paintings, thick carpeting, a variety of expensive appliances, tan leather sofas laden with hand-made quilts and down comforters. Outside, the night air was already very cold, but the rooms turned deliciously warm once we’d cranked up the central heating, and we padded around in our socks. Yet it was all so different from my family’s little wooden cabin on the lake: I missed the worn shutters and sagging porch, stone fireplace and army cots. This opulence made me feel lonely and displaced. Peter and Sarah, nestled in their pajamas on one of the couches, chuckled at an HBO movie and nibbled a microwaved goat cheese pizza they’d plucked from the freezer. I put my boots back on, unfastened the sliding glass door off the kitchen and walked out on the deck to look at the sky.

The moon was only a sliver of pale yellow that night, but the stars were exceptionally vivid in the darkness without the glare of city lights below. They winked on and off above me like a score of musical notes spread across a page––I felt I could almost hear them. I managed to pick out a few of the constellations my father had pointed out when I was a child: Cassiopeia, Ursa Minor. He told me that Polaris, the North Star, was the most important one in the Little Dipper––the brightest star, the one every sailor depended on to navigate at sea. Find Polaris, and you can always tell which way is north. Was my father up there somewhere now, too, a celestial presence who would help me navigate the months ahead? It was alarming that I couldn’t even sense him or imagine what he was thinking, the way I’d done all my life.

The next morning, Peter and Sarah awoke cheery and rested. After breakfast I dropped them off at the bottom of the mountain––they’d take a gondola up to the top and hike back down. I preferred the company of my own thoughts for awhile. I strolled through the resort town like any tourist, purchasing a handwoven sweater in one of the shops, gift packages of maple syrup candy and apple butter in another. I finally stopped in a café where I bought postcards and a mug of Earl Grey. I couldn’t tell what mood I was supposed to be in, exactly; it wasn’t as if we were all on vacation.

We spent another night at the lodge and left early for the town of Charlotte, beyond which lay the village of Thompson’s Point. I was eager to see Lake Champlain again, maybe even visit the white mansion on the tip of the Point, if it was still standing, the one my mother had always envied. But by lunchtime, the mood in the Town Car had deteriorated. My brother, the expert map-reader, inadvertently took a wrong turn and landed us in Montpelier. We stopped at a third-rate Italian restaurant, thus infuriating Sarah, who launched into a diatribe against the evils of wheat and dairy products, never mind the pie and pancakes she’d willingly ingested during the previous leg of our trip. Dad was quiet in his box in the back seat––a good thing, probably, since no one seemed to want his opinion on anything anymore. We were all out of sorts, my brother stubbornly refusing to ask for directions in Montpelier, angry that his wife had gone missing for a good hour in a dance-wear store as passive revenge for his restaurant choice. I just wanted to get to the Point while we were all still speaking.

The lake in late afternoon was even more beautiful than I remembered. But try as we might, we couldn’t find the old cottage. Peter recognized the old tennis club and the marina where Dad used to take us out in a rowboat. All the yards looked vaguely familiar, but we couldn’t find the weathered cabin or even the wooden stairs leading down to the dock. “I’m sure it was right here,” my brother said, pointing to one house. “No, wait, this next one is it. Definitely,” he said, pointing at one after the other. It was hopeless. Too many years had elapsed, and we couldn’t ask Dad. I went to get the box of ashes out of the car, for we needed to send him off before darkness fell. Without another word between us, we simply picked a spot between two houses and scrambled down the rocks to the water, Sarah holding on to my hand for balance. We were trespassing, we knew, but on this October weekend, we couldn’t even see another car parked along the road.

“He wouldn’t care,” my brother said. “He’s glad to be here.”

Who could argue? I loosened the wire tie on the plastic bag inside the box. We lifted Dad up and sprinkled him onto the breeze, watching the wind carry him over the gleaming lake, into the crevices of the mossy rocks, into the arms of the pine trees and the sugar maples mirrored in the water. I could feel my father so clearly then, just after we’d let him go, and I could feel my brother and Sarah beside me. I could feel the sturdy ground beneath my feet. I imagined I could even see Polaris if I looked hard enough into the sunset, our own North Star longing to guide us, lost sailors all, safely back or onward into the autumn night.

Stacy Appel is a writer in California whose work has been featured in the Chicago Tribune and other publications.  She has also written for National Public Radio. Contact Stacy at ­WordWork101@aol.com.

~Stacy Appel