The Lake That Shuts Itself In

By Andy Fogle

I go to A. in Human Resources days before classes start, telling her my mother’s situation. That she called me at midnight while my wife, kids, and I were on vacation visiting my father and stepmother in Virginia. That she’d gone to urgent care and was told she probably had pancreatic cancer, the same thing that had killed her mother. That she was an only child, divorced, and that I am an only child, so it all would fall on me, eventually.

She tells me many people take Family Medical Leave to care for a dying relative, then bereavement time, and then FMLA for themselves in the aftermath. There is paperwork involved, conversations with doctors, and some mathematical planning ahead, but it can be done. 

“Teachers and administrators don’t say no to others so they can take care of themselves. They’re wired to just keep going, to keep giving, to grind it out. It is ok to take the time. For both of you. You’re not going to get these days back.” 

*          *          *

Ma falls Tuesday the 17th, and goes into the hospital, where her body and mind unravel. Because of A’s guidance, I am administratively prepared. A few e-mails and I’m set. She stays in the hospital for a week, then comes home to her apartment Tuesday the 24th. For three days, with hospice’s support, I help my mother enter her death, shortly before midnight Thursday the 26th. I arrange her funeral, deliver her eulogy. Then her apartment has to be emptied. There is much paperwork, many phone calls, and what my therapist calls “transition disorder with depressive symptoms.” He isn’t wrong. 

All told, I don’t teach high school for almost two months. I keep my mornings, evenings, and weekends at home with my wife and children normal, but the weekdays are mostly spent alone in her apartment, among the hordes, the dust, the impressions of furniture on carpet, and the impression of her body on the loveseat. I also allow myself three hikes. 

*          *          *

Moreau Lake State Park, 10/19

I’ve been here often, to swim, boat, fish, and hike around the lake, but never hiked the mountain, which is part of the Palmertown Range and juts up behind the beach. Here with the kids, she sat on the beach or a bench in the playground, and once held an eastern hognose snake in the Nature Center with my son. She was never active, but wasn’t afraid of what others are afraid of.  

She never learned to swim. The story goes that her lesson was an instructor pushing her into a lake, where she became tangled in weeds and nearly drowned. I never saw her in anything deeper than her knees. Still, if she plunged her head beneath the surface and opened her eyes, what would she see? 

It’s a mile at most up the Overlook Trail, but I’m still struck by how rough and rocky it is. I’m in worse shape than I thought. It’s surprisingly pretty too, even on an overcast day; just last month, one of the Nature Center folks told me there wasn’t much view anymore because the trees had grown up, and they might be trimming some back soon. Maybe they did. I mean, there’s the lake, right there, murky silver from her ashes.

*          *          *

Prospect Mountain, 10/23

Easy to spot traveling north along Interstate 87, it rises gorgeous west of Lake George Village. One Mother’s Day with the kids, we hung out in the village, then drove up the spiraling road to the peak; today I park in a neighborhood just east of the interstate, and climb a few dozen stairs west to the grated metal walkway over 87. I look south towards where I live, then north deep into the Adirondacks, and then west towards the peak.

Passing traffic makes me dizzy, semis’ backdraft makes me wobble, and I am struck by the paradox of walking on what is not entirely solid. The walkway is either a metal grid with empty spaces, or emptiness itself with hard metal lines that we’ve fabricated. As air blows from below, I notice that metal is rusty. 

The trail is straight, steep, and rocky. I cross Prospect Mountain Highway twice, and there is one section of cutbacks, but otherwise, it’s a straight shot. No tricks, just rocky ascent. It seems never-ending, and for me, only an occasional hiker, it is the hardest climb. Well over an hour to the top with no let-up, my torso consumed with sweat and heavy breathing, everything waist-down burning. 

*          *          *

She had a high threshold for pain. Every relative or doctor I ever talked to observed this about her. She took nothing with my birth, and I can’t recall her taking an aspirin but a few times. In her last week in the hospital, and her last three days at home with hospice care, pain management was the priority. She drank crushed oxycodone in water, then wore a fentanyl patch, and I gave her liquid morphine in a squirt-syringe every four hours, tracking the times and dosage on a chart. 

The morning of the day she died, I slept past her dosage time. On the loveseat across the living room from her hospital bed, I woke up to her saying, “I’m in pain.”

It’s hard to forgive myself.  This woman that so rarely complained of any kind of pain—physical or emotional, and of which there was plenty, both kinds—here is her son, snoring away while tumors swell from her pancreas, pressing the stomach, pressing her liver, shallowing her breath, forcing her jaundiced eyes closed. 

*          *          *

At the top, I’m overcome with tears. I read the historical plaques about the hotel and cable railway, all those dead people who built marvels which were then either dismantled or destroyed by fire. I look out at the lake called by the Mohawk, Onandaga, and Iroquois where the lake is closed in by mountains, or the lake that shuts itself in. Her echo is everywhere I go. Maybe because I’m the echo. 

*          *          *

At the top, one feels a sense of accomplishment both predictable and genuine. You think, “Now I know why I went through all that.” I have only hiked a dozen mountains in five years, but no summit has ever disappointed. The awe has yet to get old. 

Then the anti-climax of coming down, of the reverse-strain on knees and quads. How do you transition, emotionally, from summit to descent, back to the old world? If you survive any deep strain—divorce, the death of loved ones, your own cancer, even this climb—when does your identity evolve from one-who-has-survived-X to one-who-lives-in-Y? 

For so long when I was young, I thought of her as “the strongest woman I’ve ever known.” I wrote that to her, I wrote it about her, and it’s still true. Now that I am middle-aged, however, I pause. The inclination to reach a distant summit—to survive some burning, to grind it out, to “get through this” and then just stay up there, watching the world drift by, hoarding clouds, is strong inside me. I’d be happy as a near-hermit. I told myself that lie into my thirties, and I don’t want to anymore, so I head back down to earth. 

*          *          *

Severance Mountain, 11/6

Reaching this trailhead is the opposite of Prospect Mountain: you pass through two tunnels under the interstate, and it’s like being in an aluminum hall, a pipe through which sound runs like water, with the highway lashing above, where all is reverberation but nothing much happens except the cool feel of early November air on your darkened face, and your footsteps grinding in your ears. 

That’s one manifestation of depression. All the elements are there: underground, isolation, cold, two pennies of light—behind and in front of you—but here, only those grinding footsteps, each of which is terrifying.

More winding but less dogged than Prospect, ascent is only 45 minutes now, relatively easy after my other two hikes. At the top, there are two views. The first is of Schroon Lake to the south, but hike along the northeastern edge of the ridge, maybe 200 yards from the first view, and to the east you will see—smaller than Schroon, without a village, and dwarfed by the Knob Mountains behind—the lake called Paradox. Trace that word’s path and you will find both “beyond” and “near.” You will also find “accept.” Going east through the sub-interstate tunnels, the fear returns, each step the rasp of death rattles in her chest, her throat, my voice, our mutual silence. But then, like any climb or walking meditation, focusing on each step, each breath, in darkness or light, is the point. To cling to light and pretend darkness doesn’t exist is no way for me to live. Harder to live between these lakes and mountains than on one. So I choose to breathe my terror, and not quicken my pace, shadow though I am.

Andy Fogle is the author of Across from Now, and six chapbooks of poetry. Other poems, co-translations, and a variety of nonfiction have appeared in Blackbird, Best New Poets 2018, Gargoyle, Image, Parks and Points, and elsewhere. He was born in Norfolk, grew up in Virginia Beach, and lived for 11 years in the DC area and now lives in upstate NY, teaching high school.