Foreshadowed ferry
42
On our first leg home, Dave and I ride a car ferry across Lake Michigan. Once again, dizziness disappears—passive motion still my best friend—and I’m swallowed into the deepest sleep in months. I recline and surrender. As eyes drift close, the last four days patch themselves into four decades, shape-shifting nature into an updated nurture; REM back-stitches wide loops between past and present, mending holes, reinforcing frayed seams.
Memories stand still: Looking out over Crystal Lake, sand under toes motionless. Sitting on Lake Winnebago’s shallow floor, body rooted. Huddling over photos of family I’ve never known, album pages steady. Posing for camera with family I’ve always known, embraces sturdy.
The present is also still: A body exhilarated and exhausted, undone, finally at rest. As the Lake Michigan ferry cuts through silver waters, delicate vestibular nerves reach out and perceive true, aquatic motion. The command center, too, can rest—reorganizing, recharging, resetting. Four days and four decades of “cobwebs” clearing, new threads now spinning and stitching.
Improve. Heal. Self-actualize. I am enough.
Focus on the positive. All feelings are welcome.
If you believe it you can achieve it. I’m not in control.
Everything happens for a reason. Life doesn’t need to make sense.
The Ride riding in a rackety boxcar twelve hours straight passing from the warm tunnel of mysterious summer night through the clean but edgeless barrier of dawn into daylight and trackside greenery bowed for one hundred ten like me we chant a clack-clicking mantra while rocking to a fro in our omnipresent blue-tree diesel smoke my altered mind reasons nothing can be done to stop this all so helplessness passes easily into sweet effortless peace like they say about drowning - Charles Brauer and my response riding on a cross-water vessel four hours not enough looping threads from an aquatic now through hopeful memories of a steadier past into sleep and surrender sewn for a synthesis of me i join the under-hull lapping while rocking to a fro in my lasting barreling fog sanity reasons nothing can be done to stop this all so like a father’s blue-smoke ride (and his foreshadowed blue-watered one) i am helpless then allowing then at peace like they say about healing
Four hallowed hours later, the boat approaches Wisconsin and a familiar coping strategy returns, quieter but not entirely erased by glymphatic flushing:
When the boat docks, the dizziness will be gone. All my symptoms were simply an identity reorganizing. Now, I have completed the journey, I am healed. Joseph Campbell would be proud—I accepted the quest, sailed into the tempest, slayed cthulhu monsters, and now return victoriously to solid ground.
but when the ferry docks waves crash ashore and follow me home
Your profound response to Charlie’s, The Ride, reflects a dialog between two souls who haven’t met in real time but share a compatibility of spirit. Vulnerable, wise, surrendered, authentic and exquisitely poetic. He would be (is) so proud of you! 💜
Oh!!!! “The pivot point between desperation and discovery.” The nothing happens IS a fertile place, and so under-appreciated. In the searching for something, my new life had already begun forming roots, tentative, but real. Thank you for sharing this. Much inspiration as a work on rewrites for upcoming chapters too.❤️