Weaving memories

So one day my dad appeared at my house and announced, “I’ve rented a houseboat at Lake Billy Chinook! Reserve the first week in August!” I could tell he was pleased. He remembered, I think, the houseboat we rented once on the St. Lawrence River.

I was twelve or so; we drove up from our home in northeast Pennsylvania and spent a week drifting from island to island. We criss-crossed the US/Canada border, which fascinated my sister Julie and I. (Julie kept saying Canada was colder. It’s Canada, she insisted. I scoffed.) Jill was still just a baby – five, I’d guess – but we included her as much as we could. In fact we three girls discovered and named a small island, Fafrika, begging my parents to moor there for an extra day of exploring. Some of our great family jokes originated on that trip. (“Black Beauty!” Ha ha! Stop, stop, I’ll fall out of my chair!) Oh, it was a fine time.

My family moved a lot as I was growing up. I never lived anywhere for more than five years. I don’t have a childhood home or friends I grew up with or a geography in which I feel rooted – but my parents have been married for 40 years and my sisters and I were always together, so we do have these shared memories. In the houseboat at Lake Billy Chinook I felt the texture of those memories. Layer over layer.

Twenty years ago my dad caught a fish off the edge of the houseboat and I ate it and was nearly sick, thinking of how the wriggly thing had been so recently alive; and then last weekend, my two brothers-in-law and my sister helped my son catch his first fish. (It was too small to eat.) Twenty years ago we played charades and all manner of games and we teased my mom relentlessly; and then last weekend we played a version of poker and teased my mom, who was just the tiniest, funniest bit drunk. Twenty years ago we were a family of five. Now we are ten – more, if you count our husbands' families -- and my parents are grandparents, and I’m a wife and a mom.

Now my husband: everything’s different for him. He is deeply rooted right here. He's fourth generation Oregonian on his father’s side, second generation Bendite on his mother’s side. He lived in Bend continuously until he left for college, and he has always considered Central Oregon to be the center of his universe. His memories show people changing over time, like mine – but they include changes in a place, too. It’s a richness I am only beginning to understand.

Before we left for the trip, he told me all kinds of stories about the LBC. Face shining in the telling. When he was a child, his parents kept a ski boat at Lake Billy Chinook. A lot of his friends’ parents had ski boats there, too. Someone had a little motorboat – not his parents, I don’t think – which he and his friends were allowed to pilot when they were just ten years old. He told me about waterskiing there, with family, with friends. He told me about the last time he ever waterskiied there: some asshole clearly out of control of his boat ran right over my husband’s line. He described the differences in the water and the terrain of the Metolius, Crooked River and Deschutes arms. He told me not to bring a towel because the sun is so powerful that a towel’s redundant; but definitely, he said, bring fleece. It’s always cold at night. He described the cast of the light down in that canyon and the feeling – a lightness, a particular kind of happiness, an exhausted euphoria – when driving up the canyon wall after a few days on the lake.

I have mentioned about a million times that I would like to give my children a strong sense of belonging and some historical continuity. In this culture we don’t have local gods or heroes, we don’t have legends from Long Ago. We can’t point to a pillar and say, That’s Lot’s wife. We can’t point to a crack in the earth and say, That is where humans emerged. We have only our own tales. We take the kids on a houseboat at Lake Billy Chinook and tell them stories about their father’s and uncle’s and aunts’ adventures there. We tell them stories about a houseboat rented on a different river, and their mother’s adventures there. This weaving tells the children who they are.