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I was 16 and sitting in the backseat of a Buick LeSabre, my right hand pressed into Mike’s left. Mike’s grandfather, Scottie, and 11-year old brother, Nate, claimed the front seat.
Scottie piloted the car, catapulting it and us down the flat, hot roads in southern Illinois. We posed for pictures in front of a giant Superman statue, ate ice cream, and then got back in the car. Scottie turned us around in the parking lot of a quilt shop, and we flew back down the road towards his and Evelyn’s pintsized rancher.
Just when we were almost there, Scottie made a turn. He pointed us down a winding road—maybe, I thought, the only one in the Midwest. He led us into a stand of bald cypress trees, wizened giants with bulbous trunks submerged in dark water. Tendrils of Spanish moss hung from crooked limbs. Scottie spoke to us in a whisper—as though the space between the trees had risen up as a cathedral—about the swamp, about his father and grandfather and the way they paddled through it, swapping stories and fishing its slow-moving waters.
Twelve years would go by before I would see a bald cypress tree again—not until last month, in fact, when Mike and I went to First Landing State Park.
We struck out on a trail and stopped at an observation area to look into the bald cypress swamp. We leaned over wooden railings, straining to get closer to the swamp, bending down next to the murky water, the black tea out of which the cypresses rose.
We were silent.
Like that day in Illinois, our own stories tumbled out of that silence. Nature, that clever trickster, so often does that. It creates space for silence and wonder, out of which comes openness. Openness to yourself and to others. Openness to the past, and to the things you had forgotten or feared weren’t worth talking about. In Scottie’s case, stories about fishing and computers and pool halls and war. In our case, forgiveness and music and ice skating and love.
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