Tilting, A Memoir
by
Nicole Harkin
We only learned about our father's girlfriend after he became deathly ill and lay in a coma 120 miles from our home.
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Overhearing the nurse tell Linda--since I was nine I had called my mom by her first name--about the girlfriend who came in almost every day to visit him when we weren't there confirmed that the last moment of normal had passed us by without our realizing it. Up to then our family had unhappily coexisted with Dad flying jumbo jets to Asia while we lived in Montana. We finally came together to see Dad through his illness, but he was once again absent from a major family event--unable to join us from his comatose state. This is the moment when our normal existence tilted.
Dad recovered, but the marriage ailed, as did Linda, with cancer. Our family began to move down an entirely different path with silver linings we wouldn't see for many years.
In this candid and compassionate memoir which recently won a Gold Award in The Wishing Shelf Book Award, Nicole Harkin describes with an Impressionist's fine eye the evolution of a family that is quirky, independent, uniquely supportive, peculiarly loving and, most of all, marvelously human.
Extract
Tilting, A Memoir
We made great time on the first day of the trip and didn’t stop at any marinas. We ate the peanut butter and jelly or ham sandwiches Linda brought and drank the juice boxes.
“Mom, where are we stopping tonight? Can you show me on the map?”
Both parents looked at me but didn’t say anything.
“Mom, the hotel is where on the map?”
“A hotel has different floors. A motel is only one floor. The places along the river are motels,” Linda said.
“We’re sleeping on the boat tonight.”
I stared at Linda, thinking about what she said.
“But there’s no place to go to the bathroom. Why?”
“Dad doesn’t know where the money is,” she said.
“It’s in his wallet.”
“Nicole, he doesn’t know where his wallet is.”
“Did he lose it?”
Again my parents looked back at me.
“He might have left it in the car,” said Linda.
The boat with its orange cushions and orange all-weather carpet shrank. The party barge quickly lost its fun.
“Well, we have to go back.”
“It’s too far to go back. You can never go back,” said Linda.
“What about the bathroom?”
“The boys can pee off the boat.”
“I’m not a boy.”
“You’ll have to jump in,” said Linda.
“What about you, Mom?” I asked.
“That’s enough.”
The locks that peppered the river lifted and lowered boats, as though they were in a giant bathtub, allowing the boats to traverse areas of the river with dams.
After the kids fell asleep on the boat the next evening, Dad pulled up to a lock and rang the bell to alert the lockmaster we needed to go through it. Without showers, we smelled and looked homeless.
Nothing happened.
Dad kept ringing. Once the kids woke up, Linda blasted the boat’s air horn. The lockmaster still didn’t respond.
This lock had railroad ties placed together to form walls and doors. Rebar steps formed a ladder for climbing out of the lock. The stars and moon shined brightly and an outline of the trees could be seen.
“Jack, you need to climb up and go find the lockmaster,” Linda said.
“He’s coming.”
“He’s not coming.”
“What else am I supposed to do?” Dad asked.
“I already told you to climb up the ladder and go get him.”
He didn’t want to get on that ladder, but he climbed slowly up it.
“Can you see those spiders above your head? Watch out for those.”
“LINDA!”
“I see some big spiders.”
Linda used the flashlight to light Dad’s way up the ladder.
“Linda, stop laughing and point the flashlight where I can see it.”
“The flashlight’s attracting bugs,” she said.
Dad found the lockmaster in his house, asleep. The lockmaster hadn’t expected a family on a pontoon boat to come through in the middle of the night.
On the way back down the ladder, Linda kept harassing Dad.
“I think I saw some really big spiders. Did you feel their webs?”
“Linda!”
Dad called a guy who had bought a plane from him and lived nearby asking him for a loan. The guy lived in Memphis, and he met us at a marina along the river for an exchange that must have looked like some shady deal. The guy drove up, handed the Dad a wad of cash, and drove off. We had some money again, but still only enough for fuel and some food, not for a motel.
The next day things took a turn for the worse.
“Dad, why’s the boat tilting to the side?”
“Well, Nicole, I think there’s a leak in one of the pontoons,” said Dad.
His calm response meant he had already noticed the problem and deemed it unworthy of mentioning to me. The fact that the pontoons were steel instead of aluminum seemed more important.
“A leak?”
“Yes.”
“We’re sinking!” I screamed.
“Sinking” sat in that spot in my brain where the most terrifying things that could happen to a person resided.
“Yes, technically, we are sinking. But very slowly,” said Dad.
“What are we going to do?”
“Nothing. It’s not that bad.”
Linda seemed resigned to Dad’s assessment: keep going, press on.
I was less convinced but stuck on the boat nonetheless.
It hadn’t rained much that summer, making the river low in some places. Dad had taught John and me how to drive the boat, making sure we looked at the map to stay away from the shoals.
“Dad, it’s a lit
tle shallow here,” said John.Dad was in the back of the boat working on something else, not listening to John. We jolted a bit as the boat slid firmly onto a shoal. The other times we’d run aground, Dad had jumped in and pushed us off.
“Jesus Christ, John. I’ll push us off.”
“Jack, no! You can’t do that,” Linda said.
“Why not?”
“Can’t you see the signs?”
We turned our heads. The signs along the banks of the river stated, “NO FISHING, SWIMMING, OR RECREATING. CONTAMINATED WATER” above icons with swimmers and fishermen X-ed out.
As we sat there on the shoal hours went by. The sun moved from one side of the river to the other. There were no trees nearby and the mosquito spray no longer worked. And, we were running out of drinking water. Dad stood up.
“Jack, you can’t get in the water.”
“I have to. It shouldn’t be that difficult.”
There was no other way. He jumped in and struggled to move the boat.
Linda shouted, “Keep your balls up, honey.”
“OK, where’s the motel we’re stopping at?”
Once she laughed, everyone laughed.
Nicole Harkin currently
resides in Washington, DC with her husband and two small children. She works as
a writer and family photographer. As a Fulbright Scholar during law school,
Nicole lived in Berlin, Germany where she studied German environmentalism. Her
work can be found in Thought Collection and you are
here: The Journal of Creative Geography. She is currently
working on mystery set in Berlin. Her photography can be seen at www.nicoleharkin.com.
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