School Pressure

By the time Eliot leveled off at what we considered a full dose of Prozac, he had returned to weekly guitar lessons and was biking home with me regularly through Arana Gulch. The next step would be to add intersections one by one, and after that, return him to biking alone. It seemed to me, as we approached the two-and-a-half-year mark to graduation, that we had a lot of work to do.

At school, Eliot was making great progress articulating emotions, thanks to his speech therapist. Lisa had made him a couple of different interactive booklets, and he and I were making headway at home. On the page where she asked him to name some things that made him nervous, he wrote “school pressure.” For something that made him sad he wrote “birthday cancelled.” He’d expressed a lot of remorse about the repeated aggression that caused him to lose his entire birthday celebration. It made me sad too, but it also told me we’d gotten through to him.

He asked once, “Do you think I’d rather be scared about life than be bored?” I for one preferred being scared, but not long after he asked I came up against my own limits. Over the Memorial Day weekend he and I were scheduled to help open the cabin at Huntington Lake. It had been two years since I’d considered taking him to a cabin full of people, much less without Blue. But Blue was staying home to help put together a bid, before heading the following week to a meeting in Modesto.

Knowing I couldn’t handle Eliot when the weather kept eleven people inside a two-bedroom cabin, we stalled until Sunday and headed up for one night’s overlap. It didn’t take much to convince him this was a better plan, since he would miss two days of school instead of one, and as he said, that many people in the cabin would be “messy.”

But in their infinite kindness the Wilsons had tidied up and left us more than enough space to settle in. Blue’s brother Tommy helped me hang the shelter Blue and I had designed so people could sleep outside in the rain. That night Tom, Connie, Eliot, and I slept under the rain cover with our heads sticking out so we could see the stars. It reminded me of my grandmother, who my mother told me slept on summer camping trips with her head sticking out of the tent. The temperature dropped into the thirties and our pillows were damp, but the blankets over our sleeping bags kept us warm and were mercifully dry under the shelter.

In the morning we had breakfast on the deck with Blue’s mom and dad and Eliot’s cousin Erin. Then it was time to say goodbye, and as they packed their cars and drove off I felt crazy for having planned to stay on alone. I thought about their kindness and how they managed to stay calm in a cabin crammed with people. The goodbye settled on me like the weights Eliot’s cousin Neil used to sink his line to the bottom of the lake, where he caught more planted trout than his mother cared to fry.

This was why people surrounded themselves with loved ones and activity and noise, to stave off the void. I filled our water packs and fled the cabin with Eliot. We hiked up the creek that ran behind our tract, and sat by the falls where water tumbled from pool to pool.

That night, when I was afraid a bear would climb onto the deck, the woods were silent. In the morning as I stretched on a boulder perched above the lake, an osprey with a fish in its talons passed so close I heard its beating wings. But when I left Eliot alone at the cabin, went for a walk, and after a mile still hadn’t seen a soul, I wondered if I should walk another mile. The boundaries of one’s solitude are much wider when there are people to fall back on.

The next day Blue and I looked for each other as he was dropping into the Central Valley and I was heading out. Then Eliot and I spotted his car coming off of the pass, and I stuck my hand out the window. As he passed in the eastbound lane, he held his hand out the window too. It picked my spirits up off the bottom of the lake and sent them soaring over the Diablo Range.