Vacationland Page 4

  I asked her to get it down.

  She said no. She told me that 309.28 was just a formality at this stage, a preliminary diagnosis. There was still a lot for us to work through, and many sessions to come. Which is of course what I wanted. But I couldn’t help myself. I had just been told that my therapy had a rule book. And though she protested that it wasn’t really relevant to my treatment, and I knew she was right, I still said, “The book, please.” And she relented.

  It was the fourth edition. It has since been updated, so perhaps this all has changed. But on that day, as I learned after some lengthy and dramatic page-leafing, the Dungeon Master’s Guide to my mental health told me I suffered from 309.28: “Adjustment Disorder with Anxiety and Depression.”

  I asked Dr. Woman what “Adjustment Disorder” meant. She said it typically follows a change in life status, such as finishing college or moving to a new city. And then she leveled her gray eyes on me and closed the book, both on the code and in some ways also on me.

  “It is often accompanied,” she said, “by an inability to tolerate ambiguity.”

  There was a silence as I absorbed this. To be fair, the DSM-IV has its own aversion to ambiguity, having micro-categorized all of the enigmas of the mind into an OCD Dewey Decimal System (Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, if you are obsessively wondering, is F42.2), even solving my humiliatingly simple diagnosis to two digits past the decimal. But she was right.

  “Well,” I said. “You are a good therapist.”

  “Would you like to sit down and talk now?” she said.

  I did want to. But I had ruined it. I knew if I continued I would just be a creep, wasting her time. Everything was clear now.

  “Good-bye,” I said.

  Rocks on Top of Other Rocks

  There are no subways in rural western Massachusetts. There are some small commuter buses, but if you are on a bus in rural western Massachusetts, you are probably at the end of some sad story. Mostly you navigate the landscape, with its great, green interims of nobody and nothing, in your own car, on your own. The streets don’t adhere to any comforting city-style grid. They curve and search passage through the countryside. Their names change when you cross the town line just in case, for a brief moment, you weren’t lost or confused. They lead to strange places.

  Sometimes Jonathan Coulton would bring his family up to visit ours. Jonathan is a musician and my best friend. I hope he does not read that last part. I would never call him my “best friend” to his face. I am from Massachusetts and he is from Connecticut, and New Englanders do not say things like that. “Yankee ingenuity” means the canny improvised fixes, repairs, and craftwork our predecessors employed to keep their barns and brains intact through long winters without ever having to break down and ask anyone else for help. Shame, embarrassment, and crippling emotional reticence is what this part of our nation was founded on, at least the white part, and Jonathan and I adhere to this legacy.

  One summer when his family was visiting, my wife and Jonathan’s wife, Christine, had taken our children somewhere else for the day—probably to go look at some emus—and Jonathan and I had the afternoon to ourselves.

  “It is very hot,” Jonathan said, and that was true. “Is there any place around here to go swimming?”

  I told him yes there was. A few miles away from our house the shallow, burbling terminus of the North River surrenders to the deep, cold Deerfield River to form a swimming hole the locals call Sunburn Beach. It has a shoreline of smooth, flat boulders you can sit on with round “potholes” in them, carved out by centuries of grinding river water and small stones. It is a great place to swim, I told Jonathan. You can wade around in the warm shallow part or jump off a high overhang into the deep part. I know you can do this because I have seen the locals doing it as I have driven by on the road that is sometimes Route 112 and sometimes Main Street. I drive by, but never stop.

  “Let’s go,” said Jonathan. As if you could just do a thing like that: drive to a semi-legal swimming hole that you have to cross unclear property lines to reach and just swim there, among the year-round residents, without any sort of invitation.

  “Um,” I said. “I don’t know if that is allowed.”

  Jonathan said, “That’s ridiculous.”

  So I took him to the river. We drove across the North River Bridge to the little incline where all the locals park: right on the side of the town road, right underneath the town signs that say “NO PARKING.” Then we walked across the street to the wooded embankment where every year Franklin County erects a small fence to bar the locals from walking the well-trod path down to the river, and every year the locals stamp it down. I stepped over this stamped-down fence. The whole experience was nauseating. But I am a gracious host, and Jonathan, after all, is my pretty good acquaintance.

  We walked down to the river’s edge. The scene there was exactly as I described (I am good at describing stuff), and we took off our shirts (disgusting) and went swimming.

  And do you know what? Swimming is fun. It is easy to forget that swimming is fun because it first requires the denuding of your gross and shameful body and, in this case, walking through a bunch of mud and sticks and riverbank ants before you are there, deep in the middle of the river, weightless, embraced and cloaked in dark water, swimming cold against the current.

  We did this for a while and we had a good time. And then we took a break to walk around the shallows. Jonathan tapped me on my shoulder (my bare shoulder; disgusting), and he pointed and said, “What are those?”

  “Ah,” I said. “Those are the cairns.”

  If you don’t know what a cairn is, I am here to tell you. A cairn is a small, artful pile of stones that you see around in nature from time to time. They are a kind of folk art. Often hikers will build them as messages to other hikers yet to come. A little cairn will stand there at a branch in the trail as if to say, “Go this way for beautiful hiking!” Or “Do not go this way because of bear nesting.” It’s not clear what, really, the cairns are trying to say. And also “bear nesting” is not a thing. The cairns are less helpful than they are spooky and quiet and never really on your side.

  The cairns come every summer to the rivers of rural western Massachusetts: spindly towers of smooth river stones, carefully balanced one by one, rising out of the shallow bed and a foot or two above the waterline. That’s what Jonathan saw now: dozens and dozens of cairns, all standing mute sentry in the North River shallows, going back at least a half mile. That’s why he touched by bare shoulder.

  I explained to him that when it rains, the cairns will wash away. And then a day or two later, they will be back again.

  “Who makes them?” asked Jonathan.

  “Nobody knows,” I said, meaning at least one person does not know, and that person is me. “It’s probably the Dumpmen and their people,” I said, “or maybe witches.”

  My assessment was reasonable. There definitely are witches about. At the turn of the twentieth century, spiritualists and psychics clustered tiny gingerbread cottages around Lake Pleasant in Montague for summertime séances and spirit healing. Eventually factions grew out of a dispute over reincarnation. Followers of George Tabor Thompson, known as the Psychic Songster, believed in reincarnation. The faction that didn’t ended up dying out, never to come back. Thompson Temple, however, survives, even after a devastating fire destroyed much of the community. Both sides proved their point.

  Later the hills were populated by ’70s-era back-to-the-landers. They went into the woods to practice a life in tune with nature. Some went a little too deep, and you stumble across their houses if you nose down the wrong rutted path: big old Victorian painted ladies with lawns full of pyramids and gargoyles, god’s-eyes and mirrored spheres. How many of them are attempting actual magicks I could not say. But if you’re going to take the time to put a crystal ball in your birdbath, you probably also will stack stones in the river at night, proba
bly while nude.

  Western Massachusetts, like all of Massachusetts, is perceived as a liberal Utopia: good witchin’ country. But it is still the country. There’s a reason Bernie Sanders opposed new gun regulation, because his Vermont hills, like ours, are home to an equal population of hunters and truck owners and Trump voters. You see them by the rivers too, perched midstream on lawn chairs, galvanized buckets of beer chilling in the eddies at their feet, daring you with big smiles to ask them to turn down the country music station on their jobsite boom boxes. They have a good time. And it would be the height of my own citified arrogance to suggest that there is no way they could be building these cairns.

  I explained this social landscape to Jonathan, and he agreed that it was very interesting and that my insight into my neighbors wasn’t condescending or reductive at all. But when he suggested that we, he and I, go and make some cairns ourselves, I took my stand.

  “Um,” I said. “I don’t know what the rules are about that.” I told him I was honestly not sure if it was legal for a human being to put a rock on top of another rock. And in any case, whoever is making those cairns clearly has a plan in mind, like summoning a river nymph or spelling out “MAGA.” I didn’t want to knock over one and trip a silent cairn alarm and end up in Dump Jail like my old man.

  But Jonathan said, “That’s ridiculous.” And so we did it. We went out to the middle of the shallow water, and we cairned.

  It was a transforming experience. You know how I’m pretty good at everything, usually on the first try? That’s documented. Talk to my old clarinet teacher. Well, in this case I must confess to you that my first cairns were ass. I was grabbing rocks from all different geological strata, smashing dark granites in with bone-white quartzes. Amateur hour.

  Naturally, I went for the big rocks, the showy ones with flashy colors and boss marbling. I hauled them out of the mud as if strength mattered even for a second in cairn building and used them as the base for huge, high monuments to overthink: towers that split in two to become double towers, and then triple towers. And then I would step back and see how terrible they were. My cairns were obvious, pretentious, rococo. They looked like the tacky resin lawn fountains you used to be able to buy in the garden section of the late/lamented SkyMall catalog. (I miss you, SkyMall. See you in heaven or hell soon.)

  But Jonathan. Jonathan is a musician, but he also has the soul of an engineer, and you could see it in his cairning. He understood it right away: matching like-colors with like-colors, like-shapes with like-shapes, into delicate, less-is-more spindles of round, smooth, darkly onyx stones, each a little smaller than the last and culminating with an almost microscopic pebble. Then he moved on to advanced maneuvers: a near perfectly round offering of granite, about the size of an emu egg, sun-warmed and ancient, perched upon a miniature Stonehenge. He balanced huge stones impossibly on top of small stones. He created arches and buttresses. I swear I saw him float a stone in the air. He was over there making Yes album covers, and here I was, with my gaudy Trump Towers of rock junk.

  I never wanted to kick my pretty good friend in the cairns so bad. But in a moment of rare self-editing, I didn’t. I kicked my own cairns down. I started over, and learned from my mistakes. I sought stones more patiently, I stacked more delicately, letting each stone lead to the next: click, click, click.

  We did this for hours. We disappeared from each other, and then the afternoon disappeared behind us. Rain came, and we didn’t look up: click, click, click. And then it stopped, and the sun warmed our bare backs as we moved from cairn to cairn, adding stone after stone, click, click, click. Click, click, click. Click, click, click. Click, click, click. Click, click, click. Click, click, click. Click, click, click. Click, click, click. Click, click, click. Click, click, click. Click, click, click. Click, click, click. Click, click, click.

  Oh, I forgot to mention: we were high out of our minds.

  I apologize. That is important context to this story that I left out. Let me clarify: earlier in the day, when our wives went out with our children and Jonathan suggested we go swimming, first he said, “I have marijuana,” and I said, “Yes.” So we each took an edible when we reached the river, and now here I was, on the lingering end of a half-legal high, half-clothed, half-submerged in a river equidistant from either shore, reveling in ambiguity, half-literally half-bathed in ambiguity, just a human putting rocks on top of other rocks.

  Eventually the sun got golden and low, our edible spell broke, and it was time to go home. We walked up the bank and this time I didn’t qualm while I stepped over the fence. I may have even stamped it. I can’t remember because it was probably a small half stamp, a respectful stampette. I walked up the road, right on the yellow double line, until we reached my car, standing alone and unmolested in its no parking zone. Everyone else had long gone home. It had been a good afternoon.

  I was in the midst of thanking Jonathan for suggesting swimming and setting me on a new life path when I saw it: a Honda Civic, crossing the North River Bridge. I am not a car person, but thanks to the year-by-year mug book that is the Wikipedia Honda Civic page, I can testify that it was probably a third generation hatchback, 1986-ish. It was making for us, fast, with more searing menace than you typically get from a Civic. It was pale blue, with a rusted panel on the front right corner and tinted windows. There were no markings or bumper stickers that might reveal whether it was the Dumpmen or the witches, but I felt immediate, gut fear. I felt fear when the Civic was driving fast, and I felt more fear when it stopped going fast and started a slow, police-style roll past us, passenger or passengers invisible behind dark windows. Who, I thought, tints the windows of a Civic?

  But before panic could set in, they passed us, speeding up again and around the curve, gone forever. I restarted my breath with a choke-laugh. Ha ha! Ambiguity! I was just explaining to Jonathan that I was afraid that Honda Civic was the cairn police and how ridiculous I was, and Jonathan was agreeing, when IT CAME BACK.

  The Civic had gone around the corner, and after one long, horror-movie beat, it nosed back around again. It headed straight for us, and then it stopped. I looked at Jonathan. Even he was confused now, and scared. This was not ridiculous. We were alone on a country road with an idling Honda Civic of unknown intention. Whoever was inside the car began to crank down the windows. That’s right: crank. That’s the kind of people we were dealing with.

  It was neither Dumpmen nor witches. It was children. Well, “children” in contrast to me. There are a great number of colleges and universities just south of where we now stood. And so the region is flooded with young people. You see them in Northampton and Amherst, glowing and gliding around on the belief that their feelings are unique and that they will never regret their full arm and neck tattoos because their skin will never age and their tastes will never change. You sometimes see them up here in the hills, and even down by the rivers, lying on the rocks, airing out their loathsome Caucasian dreadlocks and testing their new theories of public nudity. And here were three of them: a young man behind the wheel, and two young women, staring out at us, two older men who were quickly realizing they were not going to die today.

  The young man opened and closed his eyes. “Excuse me,” he said. “Are you Jonathan Coulton and John Hodgman?”

  “Well,” I said. “The billing is usually John Hodgman with Jonathan Coulton. But the answer is, yes.”

  “I knew it!” said the young man. “I tried to tell them,” he said, meaning the young women, “but they didn’t know who you were.”

  “That is fairly typical,” I said.

  “Hi,” said one of the young women. She never spoke again.

  “Jonathan Coulton!” said the young man. “I am such a fan of all your songs. The story of how you gave up your job as a computer programmer just as you and your wife were having a baby and followed your passion, recording your own songs about zombies and robots with feelings and putting them on the inter
net on a pay-what-you-can basis and cultivating a devoted fan base and a new career for yourself as a completely independent artist is really inspiring to me!”

  “And John Hodgman!” he said, turning to me. “You are still on television sometimes.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  This dialogue is all accurate, by the way. I remember it perfectly.

  “What are you guys doing here, in rural western Massachusetts, in the middle of the road, with your shirts off?”

  Now, after this afternoon’s awakening, I was a little offended. “Come on,” I said. “You know me. I was down in the river, getting high and making cairns. That’s what my life is all about now.”

  “Really?” said the young man. “That’s cool!”

  “Yes,” I said. “We are cool. We are in our forties and we are really cool.”

  “OK,” said the young man. The young woman next to him put her hand on his arm: time to go.

  “Hang on,” I said. “I have an idea,” and I really did.

  I took Jonathan aside and I said, “Jonathan, do you still have any of that edible marijuana?”

  Jonathan said he did, and then clearly regretted saying that.

  “Perfect,” I said. “Here is my idea. Let’s get these kids high.”

  “No,” said Jonathan.

  “They are our biggest fans. It’s going to blow their minds to get high with their cool heroes.”

  “No thank you,” said Jonathan.

  “Yes. Let’s get them high. And then let’s get into their car and let them drive us wherever they want!” I explained to him that this would be exciting and youthful and unpredictable! Just like riding a bus!