Getting Home

The new ceiling at the Portland airport reminds me of the bottom of the red canvas canoe we used to paddle on Lake Winnipesaukee in New Hampshire when we were kids. Our grandparents had a house up there where we spent a few weeks every summer. I’m thinking about a late afternoon ride I took with my father when I was about eight. It was the end of August. The sun was beginning to drop in the sky, the lake was flat and uneventful. All we could hear was the sound of our paddles as they entered and left the water. It was the day before our trip back to Philadelphia to start school and I’m sure he just wanted a few minutes of quiet before the craziness of traveling with six kids for nine hours would begin. But somehow – probably when a jacket was taken off – his wallet (full of cash for the journey home) was lost. He didn’t discover it until we were back on land. No one was sure when the wallet was last seen so everyone fanned out to look for it. My father, forlorn, was pretty sure he’d had it when he’d gotten into the canoe. This was not good news. He hoped that if he was right, the cash would make his wallet float.

I tell myself now, fifty-five years later, that I was in that canoe when Dad went back out to search for it, that the two of us were the rescue squad. I tell myself that I can still see that wallet floating in the setting sun, half of it dangling below the surface, the other half floating, holding its breath, hoping we didn’t move so fast that it would sink just as we reached out for it. I’ve even told myself that I’m the one who successfully scooped it up.

I don’t know if my memory is accurate, whether I was in that canoe searching with my father, or if someone else finding it was such a relief that I later projected myself into the story. Memories are funny that way. What I do remember for sure, because I still feel it every time I get home, is the comfort of its smell: musty, human, alive again with all of us there to inhabit it.

The new Main Terminal at Portland Airport. Amazingly, it’s a quiet place. And that mural at the center slowly changes over time, showing off the beauty of Oregon.