Since January I have been on this interesting journey from medicine to writing. Since Week 15, my last posting in mid-April, I have been distracted from writing by the best of all excuses – adventure and exploration, friends and family, haunts old and new. The photo here is moonrise over the Mississippi, from the shore at West Memphis, Arkansas.
We drove north and east though Texas, Arkansas, Tennessee, Virginia, West Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts, with our northernmost point a bit north of Glen, New Hampshire. Glen is marginally worthy of its name. It’s an unpretentious crossroad in the White Mountains but is dear to my heart – I waited tables for the summer of ’75 there at Wal-Rico German-Italian Restaurant, learning to make lasagna and serving flaming sambuca with a coffee bean floating atop the liqueur but quitting at labor day to hike and swim with college friends. I’m still a little ashamed about that.
Along the way, we camped in our Ford Transit, Trail package, also known to insiders as “TT” (Transit Trail). My wife and I have settled on a more orthodox name, to which we alluded in previous posts. All of the discussion swirled around quantum mechanics and how physicists have the strangest sense of humor. No, not quarks and strange quarks, but Erwin Schrödinger and his cat, dead or alive. Rumor has it that the cat’s name was Milton, so we’re going with that. The TT is officially christened Milton, both in feline honor and for the poet. As a bonus, there is a Milton, NH. Unfortunately, John Milton falls short of bonus status – best as I’ve tried, Paradise Lost has not become dog-eared on my bookshelf.
We have dropped Milton off with an upfitter, Vanture Customs in Huntingdon Valley, PA, and are now using a rental for a few more days. Tomorrow we camp in Brooklyn, NY, and the next day have tickets to see Hamilton on 46th Street.
The past three weeks I have forsaken the blog, and my commitment to writing every week, because writing demands solitude and time and joyfully I have had neither. Attention to an inner sphere of conscience and consciousness can, perhaps must, demand that the writer not hike Arethusa Falls, not sit on the banks of a great river, not walk the Cornfield at Antietam, at least not simultaneously. I have no small worry that the intent to write about a thing will change the experience in a way that diminishes it, blunting the power of the fully lived moment. I want to learn how to avoid that, to not think about what you might want to say about crossing Brooklyn ferry when you are on the starboard deck and seagulls wheel above your head and you feel the sun but would not (should not) bother with the stanza or the paragraph until the time is right.
If the time is ever right.
Flood-tide below me! I see you face to face!
Clouds of the west—sun there half an hour high—I see you also face to face.
Crowds of men and women attired in the usual costumes, how curious you are to me!
On the ferry-boats the hundreds and hundreds that cross, returning home, are more curious to me than you suppose,
And you that shall cross from shore to shore years hence are more to me, and more in my meditations, than you might suppose.
Verse 1, Crossing Brooklyn Ferry, Walt Whitman. Published in the second edition of Leaves of Grass, 1856.
Scott D. McLean, MD 