Wind, Thunder, Memory

Pamela McCarty

Summer was a short and unpredictable season on the shores of Lake Chautauqua. It stormed intermittently, sun swept away, and with its storms the sky became the same color as the lake: slate grey. The wind blew nearly as hard as it did in early autumn?and I would stand there, alone and fifteen, on the edge of the water, braced against the pushing of the wind. My legs straddled my white, ten-speed bike which I had just finished riding at breakneck speed down the hill. No hands, I flew over the sloping road with the breezes of impending lightning pulling my loosened hair straight back. My eyes sought something on its other shore, I knew that I was straining to touch something with my gaze that was out of reach, beyond the black horizon. I would brace myself against the push of the wind until I was chilled clear through, letting the dark, menacing air force a romanticism into me that remains indelible. I wanted summer to end.

We spent the warm part of the year in that far southwest corner of New York state that no one has ever heard about unless they're die hard devotees of the one hundred year old summer Mecca for the arts: Chautauqua Institution. Eighty miles west of the defunct steel mills of Buffalo and east of Lake Erie, the place is a deliberate secret. It doesn't do a lot of advertising to draw in tourists?.it's a family tradition, an inherited ritual passed down through generations. If you haven't heard of it, it's very likely that you won't. The name is Native American, hard to spell until you have it memorized, and is now synonymous with privilege, culture, golf, tennis and sailing. There's a gate around its perimeter to keep it all contained inside?.or perhaps to keep the locals, mostly poor farmers, out. Many don't even know it's there. My father, the ever- restless seeker of some paradise on earth, a Valhalla or Utopia where he could raise his children without the corrupting influences of the real world, discovered it young and kept coming back. He ingrained the memory of the pilgrimage after the Vernal Equinox into our bloodstream.

During the cold part of the year we sojourned in Florida: on All Saint's Day we were instructed to pack a few things. Only a few things: the closets were full in the winter house. I remember my stomach falling out from the pain of leaving, scrunched down in the back seat of the Cadillac, peering out the window, pillow stuffed into a wet ball, too much pointless sobbing the night before, lots of stationary to write my letters on?letters to friends I would not see until the seasons changed, friends who would find other friends. I looked out of that window and the lake melted into a steel blur, bare, black trees and russet pumpkins, gourds, cobs of corn, my crunchy maple leaves curled on the ground. Out the window and above the landscape of the Mason-Dixon line, over humid states, one thick rope of telephone wires unbroken by poles, my unblinking gaze lifted me from my corner on the three-day back-seat journey down the coast.

Our winter house was at the top of a slanted, cement driveway in Boca Raton, a location chosen once again by my father for its low crime rate and low minority population. The silver storm shutters had to be taken off the windows with a screwdriver as soon as we pulled up. The darkened, walled-up house was filled with an unveiling of metal sound, screws, clanking, tropical light pouring in?I waited with the coconut palms, pink oleanders, orange trees and hibiscus that grew in our backyard. Alone I ran the two blocks' distance to the beach and breathed in the salt air, mesmerized by these salt waves. On the edge of the shore, water screaming from its source, I was reaching for the horizon again.

With my husband I went West, just as the Chautauqua movement so many years ago spread across the states and set up their tents, even as far as Ashland, OR. Every time it rains out here in Oregon and I look up and see the heavy tree curtain, drops smacking off green leaves, blue jay and crow song, I feel the longing to return. I remember maples and red geraniums in every window box, smell the thunderstorms that batter the century old wooden Victorians, feel the warming up of the orchestra under my skin even now?now when the seasons change and the sun tilts after solstice the call, like some creature's instinct, returns. If I could stand on the edge of the lake where I swam every summer of my life, waves touching the shore near my feet, my eyes still heavenward, I would not long for winter.