The Forest for the Seas

There was a maritime thickness to the morning fog, as if overnight an ocean had seeped into the woods. She pictured it coming up, the water, gurgling over the rocks in the stream and swallowing the walking bridge and sending billowy plumes up through the trees and over the house to mix with the woodsmoke from the chimney. She heard herself thinking these thoughts as if narrated by her father, who was inside, facing the fire while his nose kept its downward angle toward a book, whichever one it was that morning. She heard him narrating her oceanic inventions because she had to admit, if perhaps reluctantly, that this was precisely the sort of thing he'd promised her. You take the dawn walk, Gwen, start taking Oswego out first thing and you'll see just what I mean, Gwen, I promise. And there she was, the very first morning taking him up on his guarantee, and proving him right. And Oswego as calm as she'd ever seen him—maybe calmer, probably the calmest, in fact, though conspicuously confused about dad staying inside, relinquishing their usual sacred time in the still dirt road and dark soggy woods. At dawn it's brilliant beyond comparison, Gwen, I promise you, like a different world, sights that the full sun scorches or spooks back into hiding by the time you and your mother wake up—I promise.

Even those three promises grossly understate how many times he'd emphatically encouraged her to do so, to see for herself the impressions of home he greedily devoured morning after morning while she remained in bed. Beauty sleep, her mother would say, winking without winking, to which dad would always affirm, it shows. When you were very small, he told her, on days when you'd wake up too early for your mother, I used to strap you against my chest and out we'd all go together, me and you and Oz, and if bundling you up and clamping you in didn't disturb you past the point of regaining composure, we would just walk and walk, the three of us, and those were the times that, believe it or not, I was so happy that I'd get sad, so content that this dumb melancholy would cut in, cause I would think to myself—she won't remember this, and silly as it sounds, that idea, that idea that we were having such a sweet, wholesome time together but that you'd never really know it happened—it devastated me. I'd tear up, sometimes, right there in the woods, but then sure enough I'd laugh at myself, not so far gone as to miss the absurdity of feeling sad about being so happy.

What he didn't say was that his sadness in these moments was propelled by an equally egregious, albeit less blatantly contradictory, insecurity—that were he to die when Gwen was young, these would be his parting thoughts, those memories with her in the woods, and others of course, myriad others with her mother, and of her mother exclusively, but perhaps especially those very quiet moments with her whole small body pressed warmly against him as they ambled through the quiet morning gloaming, he was sure that in the crinkling ebbing of eyelids before any unending sleep that his thoughts would be there, and in this strange way it was the impossibility of her reciprocating these thoughts that made his imagined death seem to him unendurably lonely, and this was what devastated him enough to distract him even from the blissful present.

But Gwen was not thinking of this as she and Oswego turned the dirt road's corner where the neighbor’s property sloped downwards enough that the fog could form like clouds over the woods, over her secret ocean haunting the lowland. She was, in fact, fully present, thinking simply of how it was true—it was all so distinctly and almost eerily beautiful, it did not resemble the woods of the later day, and in spite of all his eccentricity she could not begrudge her father's insistence of this particular fact.

Her entrance back into the house, lacking her father's often fruitless precaution, was clumsy and noisy enough to wake her mother, who was still not quite accustomed to the ease their mornings had adopted amidst Gwen's ascendant independence. She stirred and checked the time but did not emerge, overhearing her husband and Gwen exchanging affirmations of the morning's loveliness as Oz began pacing and chirping for his food.

In the hour that followed the sun climbed into the foreground and the woodland tides receded back to the confines of the snaking stream where they belonged.