Raising Wild

by Michael P. Branch

  There’s a change in the ocean, a change in the sea,

  I declare now, mama, there’ll be a change in me,

  Everybody, they ought to change sometime,

  Sooner or later, you got to go down in that lonesome ground.

  Unlike John, I wasn’t sleepy at all. As I lay in my bag listening to the breakers walk up the beach under the pull of the big moon, I thought about change, and love, and water. These are expansive topics, but I tend to sleep about three hours less each night than Eryn, which gives me plenty of extra time for these contemplations—roughly one thousand hours extra each year, the equivalent of around forty days per annum of dangerously abstract and self-absorbed metaphysical musings. In fact, my unique habit of combining strong java, hard liquor, and excessive contemplation makes me an excellent candidate for spontaneous human combustion. I once pointed out to Eryn that thanks to my superhuman frenetic insomnia, I’d get in years more of sentient contemplations than she would before they threw the dirt on the box. Her reply, without hesitation: “What if you’re only given a certain number of waking hours in your mortality allowance? You’re squandering time thinking about the shape of the universe, while I’m having wonderful dreams about being a kid again.” As usual, she had the more gracious and intelligent side of the argument. But I couldn’t sleep anyway, so I lay there singing Sleepy John, listening to my snoring dog, and picturing that sleepless ocean rocking on the far side of the dune.

  Water. We’re made of it, it surrounds us, and we buy the farm if we go more than a few days without taking some of it in or even without squirting some of it out. Mark Twain said that in the West, “whiskey is for drinking and water is for fighting over,” and W. C. Fields, pontificating about water while drinking rye, claimed he “never touched the stuff ” because, as he put it so memorably, “fish fuck in it.” But there’s a good reason why a guy with a name like McKinley Morganfield would call himself Muddy Waters. You wouldn’t see a guy named Muddy Waters changing his name to McKinley Morganfield, because he’d end up being an accountant rather than wailing the blues. We wouldn’t get far—physically or imaginatively—without water. Newborns must revisit the hydrant of their mother’s breast ten times a day, and old men must make pilgrimages to the places where they swam and fished and paddled in their youth before they can die well. Well . . . another place from which life-giving water flows.

  I fell asleep thinking of old friends who were pulled to water. Not just Herman in the South Pacific and Henry at the pond and Walt crossing Brooklyn Ferry, but also Mister Jefferson admiring the dramatic confluence of the Potomac and Shenandoah, Lewis and Clark portaging around the sublime falls of the Missouri, Twain dodging snags in deep fog on the moonlit Mississippi. One-armed John Wesley Powell lashed in his straight-backed chair to the deck of a wooden boat, shooting the gorges of the unknown Colorado. Obsessed Hemingway cruising the Caribbean in a fishing boat he had outfitted to attack German U-boats. John Muir trying in vain to explain the sacredness of Hetch Hetchy water to folks who believed that water comes from a tap. Cactus Ed Abbey floating in the unspeakable beauty of Glen Canyon before it was buried beneath sunburned water skiers. Ellen Meloy, one of the very finest of our desert writers, running the graceful bows of the Green River year after year. Norman Maclean reaching with the tip of a fly rod to touch the heart of his lost brother on the Big Blackfoot River. I think especially of young Nathaniel Hawthorne, sitting in the upper window of the Old Manse in Concord, looking up from his manuscript and out to the sweeping bend of the Concord River as it glides through swollen spring meadows and under the wooden arch of the historic Old North Bridge. He had just become a father, and he was ecstatic with joy and creative energy.

  “Rise and whine, Bubba,” said my wife, through the sound of the ocean beyond her. I wriggled from my mummy bag, crawled out of the tent, and stood up, bleary but proud in my American-flag boxer shorts, out of which fell a desiccated slice of lime. “Eeeew,” Eryn said, exaggerating for effect as she handed me a cup of cowboy coffee. Cat sniffed the leathery lime, licked it up off the sand, and then spat it out again, shaking his head a little. I pulled on some clothes and scaled the dune to have a look out over the sea. The breeze was up, and the surf was booming. Three gulls circled above me on the spokes of an invisible wheel, and a few light clouds on the horizon said good weather. It was chilly, but not nearly as cold as I had expected it to be.

  After breakfast Eryn instructed me to go fishing, which is another of her many fine qualities. “Take your gear and your limes and whatever nastiness you use for bait and go stare at the sea. That’s why you came, right? I’m going to read and discuss current events with Cat, the boy genius. Come back whenever.” So off I went, shuffling along the shore with my sand spike and rod in one hand, my little cooler in the other, and my libational day pack on my back. Because I was raised as a fisherman and also as a slave to a puritanical work ethic, I must fish in order to think—or to think about something other than how lazy I’m being by just thinking instead of doing something productive, like fishing. So I was following a comfortable routine, except that now I had the burdensome assignment of contemplating progeny, which seemed intimidating. Setting up by the deserted seashore, I sat in the sand and stared at the world, as planned, and I fished and thought, as usual. Although I had pleasant solitary meditations on the important subjects of water and baseball and evolution, I ultimately began to envision the vulnerable, belching, defecating, grinning underwater ape baby I’ve already described. Unable to shake this vision, I decided to forego the pleasures of angling—old Izaak Walton would have been scandalized—and instead trudged back to camp by early afternoon. I had decided that procreation is a subject more fit for lively discussion than solipsistic meditation—and so I reckoned that, given her central role in the would-be plan, it might be best if Eryn had an opportunity to weigh in on the subject.

  Despite my disturbing vision and unproductive musings, I had struck upon one brilliant idea: if I could imagine a name for the child that we might, perhaps, possibly someday have at some unspecified time in the future, I could humanize, personalize, the thing, thus making it easier to imagine without having weird visions. Baby, infant, toddler: these words cause mild discomfort and sound like they would trigger the need for substantial responsibility. But somehow it didn’t sound so bad to imagine hanging around and listening to a ball game with Joe or Jane. No big deal. Then Joe or Jane mows the lawn a couple times and goes off to college, right? So I entered camp with what I took to be a superb conversation starter: baby names.

  “Honey,” I asked, setting my rod and spike aside by the tent, “if we did have a kid, what would you want to name it?” She stared at me blankly.

  “That’s what you came up with after contemplating the great sea?”

  “No, really. You know how when you give a name to something that’s nameless, you know, anonymous, like a disease that you have, or somebody faceless like a criminal, it really humanizes the whole thing?” I urged.

  “A disease or a criminal?”

  “OK, bad examples. But just for fun, come on, let’s talk about what names you like. Let’s sit in the sand and work on this a little. I’ll mix the G and Ts, you start tossing out some names. Let’s say it’s a girl. Whatcha got?” She paused, looking at me suspiciously, but she couldn’t resist, which was when I first realized she had already been thinking about the dangerous subject of kid names. So we sat facing each other, a light breeze easing down the dune and the rocking ocean stretching out beyond us to the western horizon.

  “Well, I had a wonderful great-aunt on my mother’s side who I really loved, Aunt Mabel,” she said, with inexplicable seriousness.

  “Mabel,” I choked. “Thou shittest me, yes?”

  “OK, how about Phyllis—it means ‘leafy bow’ in Greek. I think that’s pretty.”

  “Don’t you think somebody would call her Sy-phyllis? We don’t need that.”

  “Well, what about something fun, like Jasmine?” she
suggested in frustration.

  “Perfect! That is, if you want your daughter to major in pole dancing. Hey, we could just name her Jasmine Syphyllis. Of course, we’d never get affordable health insurance on somebody with a name like that.” Eryn was enjoying this exchange, though she also enjoyed pretending that she wasn’t.

  “Bubba, you’re appalling. OK, what girl names do you like?” she asked.

  This was a predictable turn in the discussion, but, as usual, I was unprepared for it anyway. I tried to buy some time: “Did I ever tell you about the time I went to Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Concord to visit the graves of Emerson and Thoreau? No? Well, I made a pilgrimage to the holy burying place, called Author’s Ridge, a beautiful, breezy knoll, covered with big white pines and, well, dead writers. It was a beautiful day, midsummer, and I had just come from skinny-dipping in Walden Pond. Emerson’s headstone is this big-ass rock—just a giant, unhewn granite boulder. Thoreau, on the other hand, is napping under this dinky little stone that just says Henry. Tasteful, you know. Modest, restrained, not too showy. Still, you’d think they could have taken up a collection or something. Even Hawthorne and Alcott had better stones than Henry.”

  “So you want to name our daughter Henrietta?”

  “As I was saying, once I checked out the big boys up on the ridge, I decided to wander around the graveyard looking for the oddest name I could find. Believe me, there were some pretty funkified old-fashioned names there. But when I found what I was looking for, I knew I couldn’t possibly do better, and to this day I’ve never forgotten her name.” I paused. “Are you ready for this?” Again, dramatic pause. “Fucius Barzilla Holdenbum.”

  She rolled her eyes. “First, I don’t believe you. Second, that’s got to be a boy’s name. And, third, it wouldn’t be pronounced ‘Fewshus’—it would be ‘Fewkaius.’”

  “First, I do solemnly swear on the grave of Fucius Barzilla Holdenbum,” I said, moving my drink to my left hand so I could raise my right in a solemn pledge, “that I have spoken the gospel truth. Second, I don’t know how you could think Barzilla is a guy’s name. And, third, only an Okie with strong Old Testament leanings could get ‘Fewkaius’ out of ‘Fewshus.’”

  “Well, which of these delightful names are you proposing for your poor daughter? Not Holdenbum, certainly?”

  “Witty,” I said with fake condescension. “I had to marry the witty one.” She smiled, a little proudly. “How about Melissa,” I offered spontaneously. I had been humming Allman Brothers tunes while fishing, and it was all I could think of besides Fucius Barzilla Holdenbum, which had clearly played out.

  “No good. People will call her Mel, and then everybody will think she’s a boy—and a truck driver or a short-order cook.”

  I hesitated, thinking about the fact that two of my best friends were engaged in these noble occupations. But I had already thought of a good follow-up name. Then Eryn continued: “Besides, Melissa is like Jessica—it just sounds kind of trashy.” She had an uncanny way of anticipating and blocking my next move, though I suppose I shouldn’t have stuck inflexibly with Allman Brothers song titles. But I loved those smooth, sonorous, sibilant southern names.

  “Well, how about Althea?” I blurted.

  “Althea? That’s what you named your guitar!”

  “Well, yeah, but it’s a great name. From the Greek. Means ‘healing herb.’ What’s not to like?” She stared me down with that great fake-serious look of hers.

  “I could rename my ax. No, never mind.” I really didn’t want to rename that old Martin D-18. It would be like renaming my dog—which I obviously would have done long ago if I could have. I’d just have to figure out the girl’s name without borrowing from any of my instruments, pets, or nicknames for body parts.

  The longer this went on, the more I realized that if I were to become the father of a daughter I would be compelled, about seventeen years from now, to kick the ass of somebody who would probably look and act a lot like me. I quickly retrieved and refiled for future use the first line my father-in-law had used in welcoming me into his home: “Son, let me show you my gun collection.” But beneath the laughter of the name game I felt a real fear, some impossible-to-describe sense that I wasn’t ready, that I somehow just wouldn’t know what to do—that I’d be a bumbling father to a baby girl, a flawed, obsessive father to a girl kid, an alien species to a teenaged woman. Now I could feel the limey G and T, which I had ingested with a fair amount of sand, begin to roil in my gut. Maybe the escape hatch was to imagine being a father to a son instead. I knew this wasn’t something you could count on, but I figured the odds weren’t any worse than the ones people wager on at the roulette table—though I also realized that the simple choice of red or black didn’t involve changing diapers or saving for college and would, at least, come with free drinks. Still, it seemed worth a try.

  “This ain’t workin,’” I said. “How about boys’ names? Whatcha got?”

  “Well, what about Jeremiah? You’ve always liked strong names,” she said.

  “Strong, yes; apocalyptic, no. I’d feel like it was the Last Supper every time I called the kid for dinner: ‘Oh, Jeremiah, boy, on the way home from school, could you ask the Lord to have mercy on Daddy’s soul? Now put down your flaming cross and go mow the lawn, then get washed up for your loaves and fishes.’ On the other hand,” and now I leaned over toward her, half-turned for dramatic effect, and sang loudly: “‘Jeremiah was a bullfrog!’ A lot of people wouldn’t want to have a son who is a bullfrog,” I said, “but I’m very accepting. To Rana catesbeiana. Long may he jump!” We raised our plastic glasses in a silent toast.

  “So, Bubba McBluffer, you don’t have a decent boy name, do you?” she asked, starting the next round.

  “Nope. I’ve got three: Diogenes Asclepiades Themistocles. Real name. Means ‘fat man with healthy testicles.’ Believe me, you could do worse—with those fine testes you’d have good prospects for grandchildren.”

  “I had to marry the witty one,” she said, smiling. “Let’s eat. Maybe we’re too famished to think clearly.”

  “Impossible! We’re drinking the juice of junipers and limes here—vegetables and fruits, very nutritious. Come on, one last shot at naming the poor boy. Let’s use the trusty blues naming formula—works especially well for boys.”

  Eryn knew this was a trap, but she didn’t care. We were by the great ocean, our ancestral home, and we were with our dog, such as he was, and we were drinking G and Ts with fresh lime and sitting in the soft sand. And in our own laughing, indirect way, we were discussing the idea of starting a family.

  “Whatcha got?” she asked, knowing how much I would enjoy this. It was like hitting a homer off a tee, but it still felt great.

  “Here’s the formula: disability plus fruit or vegetable plus last name of US president. Works every time—you know, as in haunted Texas bluesman Blind Lemon Jefferson.” This was an example Eryn could appreciate, since my own blues nickname, given to me by bandmates who wanted to encourage my blues harp playing while also forcing me to maintain absolute humility, was a riff on this one: Blind Lemon Pledge.

  “Give it a try,” I said, with sincere encouragement in my voice.

  “Deaf . . . Watermelon . . . Washington.” She grinned.

  “Perfect! Deef Melon, get in this house and eat your macaroni and cheese! Deef Melon, you damned rounder, you be in by ten!” We toasted again, our plastic cups coming together silently. Cat, disturbed by our laughter, opened one eye briefly before he resumed snoozing.

  “How about Bald Pineapple Wilson?” she offered. “Bald Pineapple, you get out there and mow the lawn this minute! Bald Pineapple, put a little elbow grease into those dirty dishes!”

  “Bald Pineapple,” I continued, sternly, “if I catch you hangin’ round the crossroads 7-Eleven I’ll slice your noggin and stick toothpicks in the pieces! Why, now, Bald Pineapple, I can’t believe you swung a D in math. Way to go, son!” I could hardly speak for laughing. I truly think if we had given bi
rth to a child that moment I would have insisted on naming it Bald Pineapple. It somehow seemed perfect. Then again, everything seemed perfect.

  “Bowlegged Broccoli Adams!” Eryn said.

  “Specify Adams,” I insisted, sounding serious.

  “John, of course. The other one is Crippled Quince Adams,” she replied instantly.

  “I remember now, he ended up in a jam.”

  “Pigeon-toed Asparagus Taft,” she continued.

  “Is that the one they used to call Stinky Pee?” I asked.

  “The very same. And they said he’d never amount to anything. He was in office just after Rheumatoid Brussels Sprout Roosevelt.”

  “Teddy, then?” I said, again calling for clarification.

  “Of course. FDR was much later—you know, Flatulent Dewberry Roosevelt.” We both looked at Cat and laughed.

  “Of course. He filled the power vacuum created by Hoover,” I said. She smiled.

  “Right. Psychotic Carrot Hoover. He was quite unstable, but he had great vision in a dark time, may he rest in peace,” she said, momentarily grieving his loss until she broke out laughing again. Now neither of us could stop laughing at the fact that the other was laughing so hard at something so ridiculous. We knew that none of this was really funny, but we didn’t care, which made us laugh even more. That is the irrational, liberating nature of joy.

  “Wife,” I heard myself say unexpectedly. “Do you think I’d be a good father?”

  “Yes, Bubba, I do.” She smiled. I paused, laughed quietly, and then lowered my head and nodded it left to right—but I meant yes, the way you shake your head and raise your eyebrows and laugh before you start skiing down or climbing up the biggest, most beautiful mountain you’ve ever seen in your life.

  I sat silently now, washed over by a feeling of quiet certainty. Eryn’s face was glowing as it must have when she was a curly-headed little baby girl, and the woman who calls me her husband had never looked so beautiful before. I could see in her face a child, and I could also see a mother and an old woman. I heard the swaying ocean and felt the evening breeze and witnessed the bone moon lifting slowly out of the dunes. I was immersed in the moment and yet also somehow already looking back at it with deep satisfaction, as if I was seeing this place and time from an old wicker rocker, rocking with my old wife, endlessly rocking, on some crooked porch—ninety years old, maybe toothless and incontinent, but somehow happy anyway, and happier still to have the great gift of one clear memory of the moment I was now living. It was like sitting backward on a bale of hay in the bed of a speeding pickup: the first moment you see what’s around you it’s already racing away toward the receding horizon. Only in such a moment can we wrinkle up our lives to make the best parts touch—fold the cascading narrative of days to see ourselves being told by a larger story that, however haltingly, is still being written.