June 20, 2004
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I’m looking at a picture of my dad. It’s one I took last year, around the beginning of July, when we all went to Nashville to celebrate his mom’s 100th birthday.
The picture is on the porch at Echo Lodge, which is an old log cabin in the central Tennessee countryside jointly-owned by his generation of the family. The surrounding is the intense, almost psychedelic green of dense foliage, seen from the wide, L-shaped porch which surrounds the cabin. He’s sitting on a bench on that porch, though the picture doesn’t reveal the bench.
We had just walked down the hill to the river, and then back up in the July heat. Dad’s a little fatigued, a bit of sweat on his brow. He’s in his 70s and he’s walking through the woods in July. Then he sits down and his son takes a picture of him.
He’s looking straight at the camera. He’s looking at me. And it’s hard to read him; he’s tired enough to maybe be annoyed, but he’s not annoyed. He’s looking to see what I’m up to, so it’s kind of an intelligence-gathering look. But it’s also more than that. It’s ambiguous without more context.
I’m thinking about his life, and how it seems so ordinary to me. It’s just how dads are, according to my little story of How Life Works. He’s a decent guy, a scientist, a naturalist, a world-traveler. Canoeist. Birder. He’s had numerous recognitions from big-time scientific organizations. He’s not Mister, he’s Doctor. Just like all the dads out there, right?
A few years ago, we took a road trip together. We went to Yellowstone, among other places, and he showed me Beartooth Pass, on the northeast boundary of the park. He pointed out places where he’d done his field studies, in the Absaroka range. Sea fossils on the tops of mountains. He mapped them and wrote a paper. He hiked over some of the most spectacular landscapes on the planet and got college credit for it.
And he took a hike at Echo Lodge and got his picture taken.
Comments (3)
Great story, thanks.
it’s incredible to think of the lives our parents have lived and how much of it we will never know. i am glad, at least, you caught a glimpse and gave your father the chance to tell his stories and allowed him to remember. your dad looks like a wonderfully gentle man. what a nice tribute to a side of your father you are only beginning to know.
Have you tooled around Mt. St. Helen’s together. It was amazing when I went a few years back. It was like being on the moon. My own father and I caught flak for sneaking up to the crater and checking out the new formed mound in the center.
My father used to take us on educational feild trips back in the day. One vacation was titled the ring of fire tour. It’s too bad we no longer have that relationship. So milk it for all it’s worth. What school’s your Dad at anyway?
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