House on the River : A Summer Journey

by RAPOPORT, NESSA

• ISBN13: 9781400048878
• ISBN10: 1400048877
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2004-07-01
• Publisher: Harmony

Summary

One August, Nessa Rapoport rented a houseboat to travel through the blue lakes and stone canals of the Trent-Severn Waterway in Ontario with her children, mother, and uncle and aunt. At the end of the journey was a small Canadian town called Bobcaygeon, where Rapoport and her mother and uncle had once spent dreamy summers of reading and reverie in an old house on a green river. Although the purpose of the trip was to show her young children the setting of her summers when she was their age, Nessa Rapoport discovered that all three generations of her family were floating toward an encounter with the past. Beautifully written and evocative, House on the River explores the power of memory to shape a person's life, the deep bonds across generations, the reconciliation of mothers and daughters, and the way loss can be distilled into a source of consolation. It is the story of an enchanting journey on water and an inner journey inflected by a vibrant and joyful relationship to family and faith.

Author Biography

NESSA RAPOPORT is the author of a novel, <b>Preparing for Sabbath</b>, and a collection of prose poems, <b>A Woman’s Book of Grieving</b>. Her essays and stories have been published in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and Forward and have been widely anthologized. Her column, “Inner Life,” appears in The Jewish Week. She was awarded a grant by the Canada Council for the Arts for <b>House on the River</b>.

Excerpts

Sunday


I am steering the boat through unfamiliar water, translucent columns of lavender and silver. We are alone on the lake at the end of summer. The vast sky, the low horizon, are a homecoming, but the shimmering opal light is nothing I have seen in Canada. The rare enchantment of this pale, floating world will soon transmute into the blue lake fringed with evergreen that is the essence of our summer memory. We have talked for years of the boat trip, and now the landscapes are slipping by. 

Ten years ago, in 1987, my uncle Nat and aunt Ora rented a houseboat to travel with their children through the locks of the Trent-Severn Waterway in Ontario. Their journey ended at Bobcaygeon, the town where for fifty years my grandparents, uncles and mother, and then my generation of cousins spent summers lounging about the ramshackle cottage that in my imagination continues to represent paradise. 

Each fall since then, my uncle would say to me wistfully, "Maybe next summer we'll go on the boat trip." Last December, I realized that he was over seventy. If we did not go soon, the trip would remain a dream. 

With us on this journey are my mother and my children. At nine and five, Jake and Ella are finally old enough to be safe on a boat but not too old to disdain the idea of a week with their family. Within me is my third child, whose anticipated birth in the coming winter sealed my decision to go.

Why has the phrase "the boat trip" held me for a decade in its thrall? Why does travel on a rented houseboat seem the most sublime of voyages? And how have I come to be a writer whose family and past-from which I fled-are increasingly replenishing?

My escape from Toronto, my determination to forge a life away from my birthplace, to inhabit a world more operatic than placid Canada, has returned me in the middle of my life to the place where I began. Not to the pinched, puritanical winter of the city, but to a Sabbath of plenitude, my heart's sanctuary. 

"Many waters cannot quench love," declares Solomon's Song, an invisible banner unfurling above me.

Standing on the deck this first day, I am shocked by pleasure. I proclaim my allegiance to urban intensity, but this landscape is, like poetry, the seeming luxury that turns out to be essential. I want to memorize not what I see-which unfolds, extends, retreats second to second-but its effect on my body, refurbished by ease and sensuality.

The boat moves up Pigeon Lake, one of the Kawartha Lakes that span the province. Beyond us, the Muskoka region has the grandeur of the true north. But I love the Kawarthas, wilderness domesticated, tamed. The forests do not seem primordial. The lakes are of a civilized scale. Twenty years after fleeing Canada for the swooping majesty of New York, I can savor a water journey with the shore always in view.

In Manhattan, the blue geometries of sky wedged between brick buildings are glorious and sufficient. The morning sun gilds the pediments as I walk. I do not long for nature; I remain as entranced by the charge of New York as I did when I was a child and first encountered the city, looking up at the march of skyscrapers, the colossal department stores. 

On the lake, however, most of what I see is light. How expansive it seems after the round of winter. For I am a changeling, a voluptuary of summer born in an icy land. From September until May I pined for the long days, a connoisseur who could divine the quotient of sunlight from a sliver of dawn at the edge of the bedroom shade, who huddled at the vent near the floor, waiting for the reassuring hum of the furnace as if it were salvation. 

The exclamations of my family dissolve the reverie. We have reached shore instead of the channel toward which we were blithely heading. Much laughter ensues, as we are forced to navigate more humbly. The elation of mistakes without consequence. What is the hurry? 

My uncle teaches my son and daughter to steer. His even temperament is a quality I cherish in my mother's family. I, like my father and his kin, am of a more passionate and less adaptable nature. As a child, I felt as if the entire alphabet of emotion were available to me at any instant, while my mother hovered permanently between L and M. In my forties, however, I have met complexities beyond any I could contrive. As a result, I am a tentative pilgrim to the prospects of tranquility.

Nat is the eldest of my mother's four brothers, and, like all my uncles, has an undisguised weakness for children. Watching him patiently explain how to maneuver the boat among the buoys, or smooth the oversized page of the map to show Jake and Ella where we are, I am a child, looking up at him expectantly, and an old woman, recalling joy. This tripled consciousness-now and then and after-does not impede but amplifies my delight.

Where are the other men? My husband, an artist, is working to meet commission deadlines in New York. My father, while encouraging, is constitutionally incapable of taking a trip for six days in cramped quarters where our mode of operation must be improvised.

From the start we have the lakes and rivers to ourselves. One week before Labor Day, holiday time is almost past for Canadians, who are, in their thrifty fashion, preparing for autumn.

I, however, cleave to summer-the stately processional of small islands with red-roofed cottages and matching whitewashed boathouses, stands of graceful trees whose branches overhang the water, weathered docks from which children are diving, their squeals reaching us with an immediacy that belies the distance. Objectively, the sights are pretty rather than beautiful. But for us there is nothing objective about the boat trip.


We are journeying to Bobcaygeon. Not toward it, for we will travel east to Peterborough and then loop back, passing through Pigeon Lake again, north and west from where we began, in order to reach the town that is the destination of this voyage. Intuitively, we do not talk about it. I am not the only one who has resolved to relish our meandering and be wary of expectation. My cousins have told me that the town is overbuilt, ruined. The cottage was torn down, and my grandmother is gone.

I do not believe that such facts signify. The house has lived within me all these years, and as soon as I think of my grandmother, she stands in her dress the color of the sky, waiting behind the screen door for us to arrive, for the scrape of our car on the gravel as we pull up before the Sabbath.

My cousins and I race into the house to change. In minutes we are jumping into the river, crying out as the water embraces us, daring each other to the next dock and back while my uncle, unencumbered by any acquaintance with ecology, shampoos his hair in contentment. 

My grandmother calls us in to candlelighting, to the ravishment of Friday night dinner, challah too soft to cut, brisket flaking, potatoes drenched in gravy, lemon cake and brownies and apple pie as dusk turns to night. The cottage is falling apart, undemanding. Our parents are not here, and so there is no one to afflict our adolescence with an effort to improve us. Long after everyone else is sleeping, after my grandmother's ponderous steps up the painted red stairs, after the Sabbath clock has shut the one remaining reading light, I tiptoe onto the screened porch and shiver into my bed, waiting fraught moments until my body warms the sheets. 

Outside, the trees whisper benignly. An occasional car light sweeps across me, magnifying the dark. My self-scrutiny relents, and I plummet into dense, sweet sleep. When I wake, I can see the wild grasses, the pale orange and mauve flowers grazing the screens that are the only barrier between me and the day. 

We have nothing to do, those magical words. I lie on the dock, dreaming. In the cracks between the worn wood planks, quicksilver minnows flash in the underlight. I turn over to watch beneath closing lids as my cousins dive fearlessly, again and again, into the river. 

Squinting into the noon glare, I see, toward Pigeon Lake, the green boathouse with white trim that seems to wait for our recognition each summer, as if it would disappear unless we fixed it in our gaze. We think we will always be at the cottage and that the boathouse, evergreen as the water beneath it, will persist stolidly, enduring forever. 

All day, pleasure boats pass us in a stately procession, as layered in decks and brass fixtures as the most ornate wedding cakes. We utter the word "yacht" with reverence, for we long to be aboard one of these confections. The skippers wave, their children scurrying while they stay responsibly at the helm. 

Across the river, an expanse of plush lawn curves down to the water. Perched upon it is a greenhouse, panes glittering like diamonds. In my imagination, saturated with fairy tales, the house on the lawn is an estate from a sorcerer's kingdom. There is never anyone on the emerald grass, or in the greenhouse, or on the dock, alluringly mirroring ours but across, beyond, away. Even when we are old enough to swim to the opposite bank of the river, the mysterious magic of the house on the lawn is not dispelled. I love to close my eyes, the radiant sphere of sun engraved on black, and then startle myself when I look upon a world that is for an instant richer and deeper.

Lunch is almost too much effort. Only after my grandmother's mild exhortation do we climb the stone steps, leaving abruptly the blazing midday for the dim cottage. After we eat, my aunts and uncles retreat into sleep. My cousins disappear. I close the screen door gently behind me to saunter toward town, past the bend in the road, past the slip where a car checks my path to back up inch by inch until the motorboat it has been hauling is eased onto the water. I stroll by Gordon's marina and then Edgar's, where we buy our milk and store in a freezer vault the kosher meat brought from Toronto.

Near the sign that says "Front Street," beyond Locust Lodge, is an empty stone trough studded with iron rings where once horses stopped to drink. Crossing one bridge, then another, past the post office, shuttered against the heat, I thread my way along the swing bridge toward the library.

There I will pass the hours in communion with books I have already read, as my mother did before me. The Bobcaygeon library is redolent with their intoxicating scent, musty from river and summer. Its battered wood tables, towering stacks, and shadowy corners receive me with timeless patience. I see my mother as a young girl, loving the Nancy Drew books as I love the bodice-rippers showcased here unashamedly. Miss Cosh is no longer the librarian, but her name has entered the family lore. 

When I look up, it is twilight and I must hurry back, in time to hear one uncle or another say the prayer that separates day from night, the Sabbath day from all others. On the weekend of my sixteenth birthday, driving after Shabbat to buy soft ice cream, we hear on the radio that an astronaut has landed on the moon.

Often at night my grandmother takes a last walk by the river. Sometimes I keep her company, although we do not talk much. My grandmother is self-sufficient. She has a magisterial mind and a cool, anti-psychological disposition. To me, there is something restful in her dispassion. I am grateful that her unquenched curiosity about the world does not extend to her blood relations. My grandmother is a receptive listener. 

In August, she might point to the moon's globe refracted in water, or note the chill of autumn. The light that reaches us tonight descends from stars that died eons ago. These are the kinds of facts my grandmother knows. Alone with her, each in solitude, I am not yet conscious of how much I love her.

The unwinding hours of late Friday afternoon until our sated departure will be jewels I restring continually. When, in winter, I cannot sleep, I recite the tactile inventory-the air spiced with pine, the slap of our bare feet on porch boards, the murmur of the river against the dock, the smell of heat on the mesh of the screen door. The harmony of those Sabbaths was not, nor would be for many years, in my emotional repertoire.

To entice me on the boat trip, Ora conjured lazy days of reading while we drifted through the pastoral waters of my youth. Now I accuse her of misleading me. On the trip Nat and Ora made a decade ago, there were several cousins on board, teenagers who were delighted to take charge of navigation. Today we all need to work. We are fewer hands with a surprising amount to do. Books languish as we concentrate on our course.

The sky has resumed its azure hue, the land its green intensity. Only my uncle notices the hour. Ora, I discover, has a worse sense of direction than I do and is content to trust the family crew. My mother, having organized my father's schedule, meals, and nightly calls, has left her lists determinedly behind. And the children, like all children, have the gift of looking neither forward nor back.

Time is becoming pliant, the boat's passage gauged only by the changing numbers on the buoys. When we reach Buckhorn at four o'clock, there is not a hint of dusk in the glazed sky. A delicious languor possesses me; I cannot stop yawning.

 "Slow" instructs a prominent sign.

Although we try cutting the engine as we approach the lock, we almost crash into a docked pleasure boat. Its owners' faces are transformed in seconds from hospitality to alarm. In our panicky effort to avoid collision, we spin around full circle. Finally, with the help of nautical veterans ashore, we succeed in tying up at the lock.

I am no longer sleepy.

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Excerpted from House on the River: A Summer Journey by Nessa Rapoport
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