Less Dense Than Water

3 Photographs from last week: (1) MUZE, (2) Janelle, & (3) a place I used to haunt when I was a kid: the "frog pond." The frog pond is less than 1,000 yards from our front door, and results from an underground spring that bubbles up, drains downhill through a polluted wooded area, and collects just below a dirt embankment, at the top of which are the railroad tracks that run right through the heart of Manchester. Basically, the frog pond is an acre or so of the kind of water you don't want to drink from or really even be near. In the summer, mosquitoes the size of Volkswagens swarm around in fevered droves.

One Spring, my father and I patched up an old yellow raft we'd found. Floating out onto the surface of the frog pond, I looked down and saw thousands of tiny spiders, less dense than water, skating across the surface of the pond. I felt like I was in a Paleolithic scene of some kind, and, trying to divine the bottom of the pond with a long stick, fantasized about stirring a plesiosaurus from its million year hibernation. The frogs creaked and croaked as my old dog appeared and stood at water's edge, her head cocked aside, watching my dad and I navigate the murk.

My father is, amongst other things, an excellent mechanic who interacts well with the physicalities of things. He knows a lot. He especially knows a lot about automobiles and tires. The raft we used in the Frog Pond Voyage had had a three foot gash in it, which ran along a seam on the raft's bottom. My dad applied his trade and, in a few minutes, had turned a shredded mass of rubber into a seafaring vessel. "Let's go try it out in the Frog Pond, Dad!" I had said.

When I think back to floating there, in that raft, and in that darkened murk, while the rusting, empty flatcars of the CSX sauntered by overhead, it's easy to see it as some kind of metaphor about the kind of wild spell a father can cast over his boy. The patch that held us up. The boat that took us offshore. What is the density of the action and love that says, "World is good"?