Higgins Lake by Jeremy Michael Reed

At night in summer, though it’s still warm, you can feel the wind coming up off the water. The wind moves among the tree trunks, shakes their leaves, moves the swings over the sand by the beach, and hits the first campsites, colder and windblown for their view of Higgins Lake.

The sun has already set in its pink and orange hue over the hills on the west side of the lake, nearly opposite us. The last of natural light is nearly gone. Up and down the oval drives of campground gravel, fluorescent lights have already flickered on, looking down from the tops of their wooden poles. The areas of light they create are where people stop to talk, where families’ voices raise and lower, multiple timbres spoken at the same time, one and then the other, child and then adult, sister and then brother, grandfather and then grandson, layer and layer, sound and sound.

We’re sitting around the campfire in canvas chairs. The wind from the lake is blocked by the backside of our camper and the rows of people sleeping between us and it. I am fifteen years old, sitting here with my sister, mother, father. It is Thursday night. We have been here since Sunday and will return home the following Sunday a little more rested for my parents, a little closer to school for my sister and me, the corners of our bags packed with sand we won’t find until next year.

Higgins Lake sits a little to the north of its larger cousin, Houghton Lake, a couple hours north of Lansing, the capital of Michigan, my home state. To get there, you circle around Lansing, highways curving through the outskirts of the city, and then past Mt. Pleasant the view opens up into farmland. You see signs for little cities, villages, townships. As you go, the landscape changes. The farms are lost to the trees lining the road. You start to see the rising and falling of the tops of trees as waves up above your rearview mirror, hills spreading out across the country past the point that you can see.

This entire state was once one forest. Here, north of the last city for quite a while, the land still reminds you of its former self. If you’re driving in the evening you might see a black bear in a field instead of just deer standing in the shadows. Side roads turn back to gravel, and then to dirt.

We try to fill the spaces of our memories where certain places and people stay silent, no matter how much we want them to talk. They take on a weight there around the campfire. They become connected to that place, to our asking.

That night when I'm fifteen, once the marshmallows are gone and the fire has died down, sweatshirts and jeans on for the wind that still sneaks through to us from the lake, our feet up on the iron fire pit to keep warm, we speak about memories, beginning with those we share.

But we inevitably begin to speak of things we don’t all know. We try to fill the spaces of our memories where certain places and people stay silent, no matter how much we want them to talk. They take on a weight there around the campfire. They become connected to that place, to our asking.

My sister always asks about my grandfather, my father’s dad, who died when I was four and she was two years old. “What was he like, Dad?” Sara eventually says every summer, the stories and memories piling up in her head secondhand.

The most vivid memory I have of my grandfather is walking back, just the two of us, from the small orchard that he had planted back behind the pool and the main yard. There were pear trees, apple trees, and others that dropped these small spiked balls that hurt your feet if you weren’t wearing any shoes. He looked down at me on his right side and bent forward to pick up one of the brown, barbed balls. When we were near the house we sat on the cement planter and he took out his pocket knife, cutting open the ball to reveal a dark, wooden looking nut. He said something to me which I can’t remember, cut the nut to show me it was good, and then we ate a few of them together.

My grandfather had planted a couple patches of strawberries out in the backyard behind his house and I remember picking them with him, kneeling down in the grass with my sister on the other side of him. We ate the berries as we picked them, slyly, smiling as we plopped them into our mouths. They tasted sweet, small and soft, but tart so that your mouth tightened up after eating them. My small chest shook with laughter, Sara’s voice hitching upward in fits, doing the same.

My grandparents had a trailer where my cousins and I played sometimes, something we weren’t supposed to do because it was high up off the ground and we could fall on our way in or out. I remember sitting on the carpeted floor inside with my cousins, hearing someone on the metal pull-down steps open the latch for the door and feeling an emptiness in my chest from the fear of hearing his voice about to speak.

When I think of communication and my childhood, I think of my father on my mother’s childhood bed. I’m four years old, my grandfather has just died, and my parents have come back to tell us. My father sits there, on the edge of the bed, red faced and crying, open-mouthed, and all we can hear are hoarse whispered sounds, issued like hard breaths, gaspings, but they’re supposed to be words.

I remember seeing pictures of him in his bathing suit out by the pool, belly sticking over the elastic band, smiling. He looked like he would be most comfortable if he just got in, his grandkids squealing, him moving slowly, sweeping arms.

He had a large number of tools in the garage, all worn from use. There was always a little dirt on the floor, a little grease on his clothes. He helped build on to his house when his family grew.

His pickup truck was green.

The shirts he wore to work were blue.

There are few things I remember about my grandfather dying, but the few I do are clear.

The first is the funeral itself, in a pink room, pink carpet, pink walls, everything outlined in white. Movable chairs set with black metal frames framing pink cushions, fifty or sixty set on each side of the aisle. There were people in all of them and the image I remember is from when we walked straight up the center of the room toward the casket. I was looking to either side and saw people I remembered and people I’d never known. They were speaking in hushed tones, arms around shoulders, shoulders held. I looked to the left and saw my uncle, Jerry, with his sons, holding on to the boys my age crying, crying himself. The first time I’d seen any of my uncles cry.

The others are me and my sister at my mother’s parents’ house playing Chutes and Ladders before we’d found out, and then my father, speechless, on the second floor of their home, trying to put words to something he didn’t know how to recognize.

The next morning, I’m sitting in a canvas chair around an unlit campfire, ashes sitting in heaps of themselves in the pit, a book on my lap. My eyes start to give after having read too many words for too many hours in a row. I lean my head backward and let it rest against the back of my chair, the edge bowing to accept the weight, and I look up toward the tree branches, the sunlight changing directions with the wind’s path. I can smell the clear smell of lake water, hear children running up and down the gravel, waves brushing the shore and back, but my vision is directed to the sunlight and the shadows playing with each other up above. There’s a certain sort of comfort in knowing that my grandfather knew what that looked like, my grandmother does, my father and mother do, my sister does. I don’t know whether they too were reading a book, who else was there when they looked above, don’t know all of what it means or meant to them, but we’ve shared the same base image, and we tell each other so in the evenings when the fire is lit, the pattern usually the same, moving from the self outward, asymmetrically, lazily, like smoke from a fire.

Jeremy Michael Reed is a PhD student in Creative Writing at the University of Tennessee. His poems are published in Still: The Journal, Stirring: A Literary Collection, Valparaiso Poetry Review, and elsewhere, including the anthology Where the Sweet Waters Flow: Contemporary Appalachian Nature Writing. He lives in Knoxville, where he is the Editor-in-Chief of Grist: A Journal of the Literary Arts and co-directs The Only Tenn-I-See Reading Series.