Lake George

On the drive up to Lake George, Amber and I warble to my aggressively curated (and then a bit slipshod when time ran short) mix intended to provoke road trip singalongs, an artifact I spent hours creating in anticipation of this vacation and hopes of having at the ready a soundtrack for future trips. Upon our arrival, I comment to my family that I had made this and why, Amber offers a shrug as to its quality. "It's okay."

She hadn't slept well, in part because she needed to transport our cats to separate destinations to be housed. It required both an earlier waking time and the emotional labor of saying goodbye to pets who felt betrayed by her apparent abandonment, though only our older cat offered her any of that. (Amber assures that, so her coworkers wouldn't think she is a sap, she didn't cry until she stood in the parking lot.)

I am actively giving myself liberty to decouple my state of mind from Amber's emotions. She is having her own experience, but it is not my job to pin my mood to something she must find her own way through; if it is not about me, I have no right to imagine it is, even if it might seem to relate to me at first blush. I cannot live her life for her and she wouldn't ask me to, so the sacrifice would be mine alone. This is a lesson I should have learned in prior relationships, but better I learn it today than tomorrow.

Part of my work for myself is focusing more on what I want. This is a form of selfishness that has been foreign to me, when I usually pester my lover by doing what they want, accommodating them at my expense. Does Amber need me in the room while she naps, even though I am not particularly tired, having somehow gotten enough sleep the night prior? No. I can go and splash about the lake for a little while to familiarize myself with the silt between my toes. I can doggy-paddle in the renovated pool -- I never progressed much past the "not drowning" stage of swimming -- even though Amber has no love of chlorinated water in abundance. In years prior, I would have fidgeted beside her until falling into a doze, which would have prevented Amber from resting as much as she needs. This way, everyone gets what they wanted but, more importantly, I get what I want while she does. I can be my own person and trust that Amber will handle herself and will state a need as she finds it. I am not responsible for her happiness, though I want to be the cause of it when possible.

Bear

The plan for this initial day had involved us bringing two of my brother's children in our car, my mother and father transporting another two, and the final two coming a day or so later with their parents. My second eldest niece had a performance to attend, only said performance seemingly evaporated after all parties agreed to their roles. I was looking forward to taking Addie and Aydan to Lake George with us, as I don't feel Amber and I get much time with the niblings outside of their parents, though we have offered to give the older ones a place to be if they need, or to take the younger ones out to a movie. We like them -- Amber especially loves Addie and the feeling is more than mutual -- but we are just the aunt and uncle, ones who live an hour away. If we had some farmland where they could exhaust a summer day, it would be one thing, but we have an apartment increasingly filled with pets. We are not convenient for these potential memories.

When we arrive, my two nephews were splashing in the pool, watched over by my mother. No other member of my brother's family is present, and it was nebulous and speculated upon when they might arrive, if at all. The guess was that Dan would not come owing to work or inclination, which caused me a sheen of queasiness. It is not the same vacation without my whole immediate family in attendance.

My youngest nephew, whom we cursed by nicknaming him Bear as a baby (his name is Aaryn, so it was inevitable), christening him with fierce grouchiness and unexpected physical strength, snarled when asked to abandon the pool that we might get to our boat tour and then dinner. His older brother, Aydan, is a gentler soul who spends much of our walk arguing with me about who the strongest Pokémon is (He swears it is a wingless green dragon with a yellow stripe and is confused that I can't intuitively finger the suspect; I, good uncle, argue back that one needs to consider attack, defense, and health, allowing many potential answers, none of which are green wingless dragons with yellow stripes).

The tour is typical, save for the captain informing us that Georgia O'Keefe owned one of the houses on the shore and endowed a degree of her money to the community, followed by a repeated exhortation that we generously tip the two women who keep the boat tidy. When I lean over to make a joke about orchids, Amber hushes me so that she might better hear the fuzzy lecture we have heard for five years together, that I have heard for decades.

Aydan

When Bear exits the boat after, he keeps the $2 tip my mother handed him, apparently feeling that he is owed at least this much for having to endure a boat tour when he was hungry and orphaned.

At dinner, too late for Bear, he pouts that he wanted the whole plate of the mozzarella sticks for his sole consumption, so he put his head down and refused to engage us or do more than bite once the stick he did have. My mother offers to order him his own plate to keep the peace, but it is no good. He wanted that specific plate and nothing else would satisfy him.

More so than any child I have encountered, Bear straddles the line of eating nothing and eating everything. At parties, he will pile a plate high with whatever is available, will eat three tactical bites to discourage anyone else from stealing from his take, and will run off to do something else. When questioned, he will assure that he is coming back to finish off the now warm macaroni salad and cold hamburger, but he never does. The world is too full of gleeful abandon for calories. He will then growl that his food has been discarded.

In leaving for our individual ends to the evening, my mother hands Aydan and Bear $5 bills to give to the cover band croaking in the corner, two men whose laser focused strobe lights spent the hour shining directly into my eyes and whom I thus detest. Aydan dutifully deposits his money with a grin. Bear swaps out the bill for $1 and pockets the remainder, $6 richer for the evening.

Bryan

Despite my own lack of sleep - my mood may be independent of Amber's, but my sleep schedule is not - I am filled with delight. In the last few months, I have come to find that I thrive on the presence of people who do not demand too much of me. I am happier, wittier, more energetic. I can, as I struggle to make my therapist understand, find my words. Whatever introversion I once ascribed to my innate inclination has itself inverted.

The forecast is rainy for the week, a factor that would have once made me feel cheated. This will be my one vacation this year, assuming someone doesn't demand my presence in a month, preferably somewhere tropical and all-expenses-paid. Doesn't the world owe me sunshine? But, of course, the world owes me nothing, not even its continuation, so I will enjoy what I am handed.

Amber and I surveil the town to see what has changed and what has not. There is an escape room and a kebab shop. The used bookstore that has been going out of business for five years has been replaced by someone who does henna art, to Amber's distress. Down to the poor caricature artist on a porch, everything else is congruent, if not identical.

When we return to the room, my parents discuss the particulars of spending the next day bowling and at an arcade. Bowling is supposed to be fifty dollars a person, a price my father notes includes a shoe rental. For that, I'd expect to be able to take the ugly shoes home with me as a trophy. When my mother asks for further justification of this price, we see that laser tag is included.

My family are not necessarily bowling people, but my mother is clear that we are especially not laser tag people. I have not played it for years and didn't like the competitive aspect of it when I did. I'd prefer if we could all attack nonhuman combatants. If we attacked one another, it is all we would hear about for the rest of vacation. Also, as it involves coordination instead of cleverness, I am not likely to be the uncontested victor.

By Tuesday morning, it is clear my brother is not coming to vacation, despite my mother's attempts at cajoling him. He is in the midst of a big project for work, which my mother boils it down to changing all the lightbulbs in a grocery store, something that can't possibly be right or a proper use of his considerable skills and paltry vacation time. So he might also be here, his recently returned daughter Ayannah and Becky were reportedly supposed to have helped him with this task before vacation, but that doesn't seem to have happened to satisfaction, if at all. Dan has occasionally come late, had to leave early, but never missed vacation entirely. I would hate this, missing my annual reprieve, but he goes on trips with his family often enough to ease that disappointment. Lake George may not have the resonance to him that it does with me. It may simply be a place, one he knows well. While I am sure he would love this trip, he may not need it. Having to miss it because he is working this job is galling, at least to me, but he is surely doing the best he can. He wouldn't miss this unless he had to.

Amber, pouting at my command

Dan and my father share a relationship that is not equivalent to that he has with Bryan or with me. Dan is his drinking buddy, the one with whom he can talk machines and children. I have my own plane of conversation with him, but he is missing a third of the options provided to him by three sons. Dan is a part of vacation for him and I know he feels the lack.

Instead of bowling and because the weather cleared up by the afternoon, we play mini golf at a course that promises a free cone for completion. Over mini golf of all things, Amber becomes a coquette the likes of which I have not seen in a while, taunting me by trying to give me a hickey when my family leaves us behind to finish up a hole. Work and school have wormed into her, turning her vivacity down a notch when she remembers that these await her -- especially school, which is going to be a part of her life through the foreseeable future. She enjoys the further independence of having her own paycheck and has her ego gratified by working as a vet tech, but it limits her free hours. I am no longer her focus and haven't been for several years. Being the center her life isn't necessarily healthy, but it was nice to be able to give her leisure and freedom to explore while I could.

I tell her how much I see her growth. She gives me a playful jab to the arm for being cheesy, but I affirm I am sincere. She is so much more than she was when I met her and, while I found that girl easy to fall in love with, I often discover frequent new reasons to love Amber. Vacation has always been a few days where my partners were least burdened by their lives and I could feel we were more fully together, though most of our vacations have involved the influence of my parents.

Dan's family, possibly by dint of his absence, feels less like a part of Lake George. We are together, but oil and water, touching but not unified. No one seems noticeably upset by this, there is just not a strong cohesion between the groups. In energetic bursts, the smaller children migrate between Becky's valence and my parents', as is their natural wont, but the interaction between the parent and grandparents is less interactive.

Family roles renew during vacation. I pester Bryan lovingly. He asserts his geekery and ostentatious difference. We have a rhythm. Dan's absence throws a hitch into it, but he naturally gravitated away as he increases his role as passive patriarch to his brood.

I can do without some of the grander aspects of Lake George - the boat ride and the theme park, perhaps - but little things like the calliope music of one of the steamships tickles my soul. The smell of the candy shop fills me with coziness, though I do not necessarily want to have any of the candy. It is as though I have left seeds of my soul here and the annual harvest nourishes me.

Vacations remind me more so that I should be a happy man and sometimes am. I have a loving and pretty wife who seems to like me - this could all be a clever ruse for security for the pets she continues acquiring - and some talent for writing. Even the more tedious parts, such as my day job and winter, aren't fatal yet. I have fun when I can. I am healthy and am actively trying to be social, with some success.

Amber, at the beginning of the hike

That night, Aydan has us go to Texas Roadhouse, since he was unable to go there for his birthday. I must love him, because I endure using one of my vacation meals on a restaurant I find repellant it its attempt at faux quaintness and enormous portions. I can't speak against throwing peanut shells on the floor, if this is what one is into, but the rest is something I try to avoid when possible.

We are seated in two adjoining booths - there is no better way to accommodate twelve people - and are quickly served appetizers by a waitress who hides behind a candy pink smile how harried she is. Becky presides over her table of children, including Yannah, who is back from her California program though she wishes she weren't. With so large a group, I don't actively notice my dislike of the restaurant. I even try a few fried pickles out of a sense of bonhomie. When the waitress refills our drinks, I mouth that it is my nephew's birthday (or it is within a month of his birthday and that suffices). Without him, I assure her, we would not be here. She smiles - a genuine smile for once and not the pained one necessitated in the service industry - and she promises she will make this good for him. When the meal ends, she rallies a few other of the wait staff over, seating Aydan on a saddle and serenading him. He is so beyond happy that it makes the rest of the meal, the coming here, completely worthwhile.

We walk the town later, having more time to explore. I love being here, but it does not overwhelm as it has in years prior. Amber looks without success for a book for her coworker's baby shower, then at the trite phrases printed onto injection molded wood in several of the shops, affirmations that one dream or live, laugh, love, script asserting someone is loved by their boyfriend or girlfriend. She likes these and owns how basic this is, though she then makes a game of picking out the classiest posters she can find, since they tend toward pictures of marijuana strains or photo edits of Marilyn Monroe with Confederate flag tattoos and dual handguns.

We buy nothing, though Amber peruses the hermit crabs for the most damage one to rescue to her hospitable terrarium. They all deserve a better fate, but why not save the one with the fewest limbs, the crustacean who would be tossed in a child's garbage can within a week of being sold? She has it in her to save the weak. I joke that she had better not ever encounter an orphan because I don't want kids I cannot return at the end of the day.

"Lake George is funny," Amber notes. "People used to come here to sit by the lake, to swim in it, so a few tourist things sprang up to accommodate that. Now, it is all tourist crap. You could come to Lake George and never be near the lake. You would barely need to look at it."

It is only Tuesday night, so there is ample time to get on one another's nerves, but my family is doing well so far. We have gotten along less well in some prior years, too much passive headbutting and grumbling friction. I do not know if it is because we lack Dan, whose family outnumber us, or merely that we do not have a reason to quarrel. Bryan no longer lives with my parents, though he visits often. They are therefore not so worn out with one another's company. Amber and I are independent and easy going. Becky doesn't much need us either. Though there was some implication that there might be drama, it must be below my awareness or caring.

My mother tells me to come out to the concrete porch of the hotel once we return, where I think at first she is calling my attention to my young niblings launching glowing toys into the sky that float down to earth. It is beautiful in its way, shining and childlike, enthusiastic.

Good advice, rock

Then I see that there is a single red Japanese lantern a hundred feet up in the distance. Though I imagine this is technically illegal, it is done over the lake and I cannot imagine much harm to it. Certainly not enough that police would harass the tourists. This is a lovelier sight, almost magical, and I am grateful for it.

I call Amber out of the hotel room. She lays her head on my shoulder. "Just like at our wedding, remember?"

The next morning at Great Escape, after we have twice gone on the wooden rollercoaster The Comet, Amber suggests a ride that is not my usual speed as it better resembles the spin cycle in a fancy washing machine, but I feel brave enough to follow her flow without her asking. There would be no shame in taking a pass, but I did not. She says later, with good reason, that she knew I would hate it, but wanted to let me make my own mistakes.

I regret this almost from the moment the harness locks about my chest and the nausea finds me. I have not vomited in years but have to actively throw logic at my stomach and inner ear. "No, we do not have food poisoning. You do not need to make me lose my breakfast. Please don't make me throw up."

My body either does not listen or care about these facts, this pleading. With each apex of the revolution, the sickness doubles. For reasons of decorum, I am not saying that, intuitively understanding the physics, I heaved just enough to relieve the pressure and propel it away from me and into some unfortunate tree. A lot of things might have occurred, but there is no crime without evidence.

The sensation upon landing is not relief to again have arrived in solid ground, but stinging blindness as my tears have urged sunscreen into my eyes, tottering uncertainty that I can make it to the nearest bathroom to at the bare minimum wash my eyes free of contaminants, if not repeat my lecture to my inner ear that I didn't binge on a trough of expired shrimp. I sit in a stall, damp with sweat, my head against the wall until I feel more capable of again entering the world outside.

When I ask Amber how she can endure this torture, she states that she finds rides like that calming. Flung head-over-feet in the air, she can finally relax.

There might be an object lesson here in listening and obeying what I wish to do, rather than what I think others might want of me or things I want to want. I can't say, since I don't go in for heavy handed metaphors with a mouth tasting of partially digested Cheerios.

Becky and her family do not join us for dinner that night, leaving only the adults to share inappropriate stories over never ending salad and breadsticks.

One of so many mushroom pics

The next morning, Amber suggests we take a hike and, though I assume this will be an amble through the woods - it is vacation after all - it turns out to be a steep incline over the rocky droppings of a forgotten glacier. Upstate New York is rife with these, though most of the evidence is centuries hidden or turned into walls. However, no one is going to bother clearing a mountain of its rocks.

We reach what I think might be the top, but turns out only to be a road we must cross to resume the hike.

Owing to Amber's ankle injury, it has been years since we went on a hike of this intensity. She says we need to do this more often now that her ankle is finally feeling better. I missed this, though I wanted to accommodate my wife's inability; I would rather not hike with her then hike with anyone else. Though I am trying to be more independent, there is a threshold of potential fun and memories beyond which I do not wish to venture without her company; hiking without Amber feels unfaithful, though hiking has never been a primary activity between us.

As we get a mile into the mountain, my legs shake whenever I stop. I faintly worry that they will rebel if not employed in the ascent, so I urge myself to get higher, though people have been telling us for at least forty minutes that we are just about there, the liars.

Lake George could easily grow stale but, as I've come to be more comfortable in myself this summer, I am more willing to let Lake George be what it is. This hike pushes away some of the cobwebs of the place, showing me that it still has surprises to those who look and are willing to walk three blocks from Canada Street.

Deep in the woods, Amber talks of harness training our recently acquired kitten, Jareth the Goblin King, and taking him on hiking and camping trips, as well as bringing him wherever dogs are forbidden, then taking pictures of him in front of the sign. We would give him his own Instagram, JarethIsNotADog.

When we reach the apex, I see a too-massive parking lot and a small bus that does nothing but drive people from the summit to the parking lot and back again, a span of a few hundred feet. My shirt is saturated with sweat and, more than likely, the spores of the dozen species of mushrooms I had tried to photograph. Amber's is drier only because she stuffed it into the bag half an hour into the hike and continued the climb in a sports bra and jeans, though was concerned this might register as indecent to the other hikers, who took no notice of a woman more dressed than she would have been had she gone to the beach instead of the mountains.

My mother calls when we still have another forty minutes to our descent, asking where we are.

"Prospect Mountain," I answer because I assumed we had this conversation already. Amber thinks we didn't, that I mentioned we were considering doing this while in my mother's presence and didn't say we would actually be.

"How did you get there?"

"Our feet?"

This is a startling answer - who hikes a mountain on a vacation? - but we won't be able to get to her quickly enough for her activity. There is no sense rushing a walk through the woods, particularly when the hardest part is behind us and we badly needed lunch, a shower, and a little rest before heading back into town.

I had hoped we might hit up a mystery spot later in the day, one that promised askew houses and gravity anomalies, according to one of the tourist magazines. Becky and her crew had gone, only to be told that this tourist attraction is aspirational, that no part of it exists at present or might ever exist, and the only reason it is in this magazine is that its writer is the one who owns the property, according to his mother. I was not sorry I agreed to hike before discovering this.

The day will afford little relaxation. When the day is done, my Fitbit registers almost fifteen miles of walking. We have earned the soreness we will surely feel tomorrow, which feels like accomplishment.

At our big meal of the vacation, we go to the Adirondack Brew Pub, where we are served by Mollie, our waitress last year, who we remember and who seems to react with surprise to see us again. It is hard to tell if she actually remembers and how much is waitress mystique to try to guarantee a larger tip (though we are not a cheap people when it comes to tips, particularly on vacation). It is not the first time that someone in Lake George would have remembered me from year to year, though I do not know why we would be so memorable. Then again, we remember her, so who am I to question?

After dinner, tipsy from the beer sampler she ordered, Amber urges us to wander in search of Pokestops she has never spun, being sweetly pesky and baldly affectionate. She is more girlish than she has been in a while, as she has let herself be as her head swam with calculus and anatomy, and I am charmed by her. This will be. my favorite part of vacation.

She prods me to buy her ice cream, then to get hermit crabs before she can reconsider, though she does imply that she ought to just stick a few in her pocket and make a run for it, assuming the clerks cannot possibly care enough about the crabs to give chase. There are so many small ones and it is inevitable that the mortality rate is generous. What would be the cosmic harm in shoplifting the condemned?

She chooses the two least fortunate of the lot, small and pale and missing segments. They barely move in the shop, seeming almost like empty shells as they are put into the plastic cage. The moment they are in Amber's hands, it as though they feel the death sentence lifted, scuttling laterigrade over her.

It is challenging to give well wishes to a crustacean whose brain is just a dorsal and ventral ganglion, but I tell the crabs they've won the lottery. Granted, not the one that would put them on the beach where they spawned, but Amber will give them a reprieve from further maltreatment.

Of all things, I have struggled to remain present, in the moment, when it comes to fireworks. I can't speculate why this is the case, though my intuition points to the glory of it, the hundred displays I have seen before witnessed, the indescribability of the scene, the throng about every show, the noise that panics my animal brain. I was in no fashioned mutilated or spindled during any fourth of July, yet I lose myself to unrelated thoughts when the explosions begin.

Yet it does not happen this time. I sit on the pier beside my wife, sip a can on seltzer, dangle my feet in the lake, and am nowhere (and nowhen) else.

My mother, cutting cubes of cheese for our Thursday night final party on the porch, asks if she ought to just dice it all and throw away whatever we don't eat. She tells me that we all need to pretend this is going to be what it once was, a profound and inebriated conversation unwisely done before we must get up early to drive to our homes the next morning, a time where we tell stories and truly connect as a family for a few small hours. If we admit that this is not going to be as raucous, sadness, lubricated by alcohol, will overcome my father. This is familiar, something I've done too much in my life, fighting against endings and change, though they come no matter what I'd want.

We are not capable of obliging, nor would it be wise. I don't drink, though they bought beer for Amber that I didn't think she would want, so she would be included.

So far below

Just before we leave, I begin to feel the malaise of coming nostalgia. I am faintly satisfied that I have kept it as bay this long, but I would prefer the resilience to keep it away forever, since it serves no purpose other than to taint an otherwise enriching experience. There is nothing in Lake George available to me that I wish I had done; I have no regrets except that it ended at all.

I can enumerate reasons - I enjoy Amber's presence without distraction, I love being around my family, I welcome novel stimuli (particularly on someone else's dime) - but I have said them before, likely in the same words, and they don't give satisfaction or resolution. Amber credits the extremity of the emotion to my parents waking us up before she would have liked. Amber has it worse than me, as I can fall asleep easily thanks to meditation, medication, and earplugs, eliminating the worst of my family's nocturnal television watching. She tosses and turns in frustration.

In mulling over why Lake George is so beneficial, I think not merely of what I have now that I do not above, but what I lack here. I have my computer open for no more than ten minutes in the week, entirely so I can look at photos. I do not treat this tool as entertainment. I watch no television, so much so that Amber realizes as we are packing up that it was not plugged in. I do not leave my car except upon arrival and exiting. These are not profound realizations and ones with which I have been experimenting this summer, but this was a fine unintentional demonstration. I would like to take this lack of distraction with me.

My therapist suggested the reason I did not immediately get better when summer started is because I did not have anything to do, whereas my day job keeps me too busy to focus on my mental health (when it is not worsening it by dealing with depressing and dysregulated boys) but it is more that I still felt I needed to do things. I wrote at the library whenever possible, which frustrated me and burned me out when it wasn't going as well as I would have liked. I made myself follow a schedule as though someone were taking notes. I refused to see my hours as mine. Vacations remind me that is all they ever were and I shouldn't waste any with passivity.

Soon in Xenology: The further interrogation of Ken. The Dutchess County Fair.

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