Nudging tethers, near-violent landmarks
Two weeks on the road, and Karl-Anthony Towns.
In the tent, before the storm rolled in, we had headlamps on and were trying to read through the 18km winds ripping against the plastic tarp pulled taut overhead outside in the pitch dark. It sounded like being snug inside a jet engine, a sound so loud there was a physicality to it that rejected any of the words I was straining to keep.
Something big and white skirted out from the corner of my eye, pocking the transparent mesh of the tent with a weight substantial enough to cave it in where it moved. A spider, wolf maybe, lit up from underneath by the light strapped low on my forehead, otherworldly in how weird and close and gross. It trucked its horse chestnut size body from one side to the other and I yelped to make sure the inner zippers were done up.
Later, when we’d somehow been able to sleep because we woke up to the jet engine turning into a helicopter overhead, one rope that had stretched the tarp to a tree unknotted by the wind and the tarp flipping around on itself, we went out in the dark and rain to take it down and all I could think of was that glowing bug getting in, crawling over our faces and the dogs, unimpressed, tucked down at our feet. Drifting off again to the relative quiet of the plain rain and wind and the lake, roaring, 20ft away, my brain handed me an adage to turn over maybe meant to be comforting but disarmingly and blandly true: worse and better things get in without your even realizing.
On the road short check-ins come from friends, like nudging tethers to home.
Your gogs? Steph texts, along with a picture of Julie Delphy.
Look like eh, I respond, zooming in on the still instead of taking my glasses out of their case stashed in the glove compartment at my knees to look.
We drive down Manitoulin from the top just to see Huron from a different angle. We see Michigan, low and hunched on the opposite side of St Mary’s River before it spills into Superior and the invisible lines between this country and that gets swallowed under. We approach Sudbury in the gloaming and the Big Nickel flashes sinister, 30ft tall, way up on its hill. There’s only one other couple who pulls into the Dynamic Earth science museum parking lot as we do and when we ask if they want us to take their picture they reply, “We got enough.”
We drive along narrow highways cut through shorn cliff faces blown away, we wind along roads that rise over inlet basins on either side, we wait to drive slow across narrow bridges one at a time. Light and rain pour down from skies that never settle, the car is covered in blood and bugs.
Hours blur easily, time marked more reliably by the landscape and where it becomes brooding, climbing, spare, sweeping, where swamp gathers into rivers that wind alongside the highway, vanish into clumps of clustered pines, or widen, like the St. Lawrence did as night slunk down from the Laurentians so we woke up to its hard shining surface, pocked and glowing like hammered tin.
I text Greg about the pileup we narrowly missed two hours south of Quebec City. How we had to slam the brakes and hit the hazards like the five cars in front of us did, watched in the rearview the SUV behind go swerving into the slump of the grassy median to miss us.
We had one of those too, he replies, outlining the identical way his happened in almost the same place, a week before. Roving, near-violent landmarks. Postcards predicated in relief.
Does Karl-Anthony Towns need to have patience, for or with anyone, at this point? I think no. When your life has been laid bare, and out, for everyone to see like his was for the past year and a half there is nothing you are required to say for yourself. And still, he does. And still, he’s asked to.
What it is with Towns is all it is with anyone leaning so hard against a way forward or even basic sense: the resentment in being told how to get there. To stretch so far into warping simple logic that they, even the people who hold Towns up to a purely arbitrary place of authority because they see pro athletes on some other, impenetrable echelon, want to convince him of this other way. That he is wrong, but who could blame him? And Towns, time and again, politely demurs, or dredges up the kind of pain that goes to work on the foundations of a life like a swarming infestation in order to, I really think, spare someone else the same.
There have been many times over the past season and a half that I’ve wondered when will Towns, not even snap so much as be blunt in the slavering face of so many basically begging to be told to shut up. But Towns, at 25, has a two-fold maturity. One, predicated on his career and the acceleration that being in front of people, cameras and microphones for so long, since before his bones did their last burst of growth and his baby fat melted away, will bring. Two, the irreversible, expeditious maturation of grief. How it will fracture and fold time, draw it out or erase full days, months, come snarling back unbidden to kick and scratch at the door so that life becomes a wary, strained vigilance that wears into the body. Towns has both and even beyond them, seems to revert to compassion as a steady state, a place he knows the ropes of.
The closest there was to Towns telling anybody off came a few days ago in a tweet that still couched anything biting in the dumb nebula of excuses he was referring to, that he didn’t even call that but left floating in air quotes, bound to drift right over each idiot’s head.
The replies are cruel and funny, and only funny when it’s possible to read them with distance, like an abstract, stupid artifact of a long dead civilization instead of whatever percentage of this one they are, up and walking around. They are pleading, but the way someone would sound speaking to themselves in a mirror. They loosely cite freedoms the country was founded on as all the reason anyone would ever need, as if it would be a strain to reach back through time and blithely point to the small faction these original freedoms were meant for. You’ve got my body my choice people who only feel that way about the one body in question. You’ve got do your own research while rejecting science which is, still and always, our strongest research. I get hesitancy when looking at the historic record of dubious to malicious efforts in public health wracked on Black bodies, but none of what’s there is that.
Towns is corrected, I’m-sorry-for-your-loss-but-ed, infantilized and outright ignored but the thing he was never doing was asking. There isn’t really a question, anymore, for people who would rather take something given to horses via an extremely long plastic tube fed from the mouth down into the stomach, the irony of an image like that and ending up on a respirator being so great it jumps past the point of scoffing coincidence into are we sure some advanced alien civilization hasn’t gotten bored with watching us and wants to get its hands dirty?
What is ironic, though, is that curiosity — emotional, intelligence, comprehension — turned out to be the first thing killed off when the people who claimed to want all of the information went looking for it.
There are so many towns in Ontario. Not even Northern Ontario, as our brains, mentally positioning us with the woozy, deft surety of a kid coming off ten spins and pining a tail on the couch instead, kept urging. Middle Ontario, with what we know dropping away south and the rest stretching so far north the roads quit. Towns with names like Spanish, Cloudskee, Saint Cloud, Sucker Creek. Boarded up towns, Western movie set towns, towns with three houses and a gas station. Towns where you earnestly wonder how people came to live there, not because they’re unliveable, or ugly, because they’re beautiful, and seem like fine places to winnow days, but are so conceivably far from any track, which is why people live there now, but how, in the first place?
What do you think the most twisted first dance has been, I ask.
Earlier, I’d seen a water snake slip along the slant of the old resort’s cement breakwall. Waves kicked up in the wind occasionally making it up and over, trickling down into the decades old cracks and over the snake’s shining body, stopping to idle occasionally in the sun.
What was yours? He replies. The joke so easy and quiet I miss it at first, overpowered by the soft light of the canopy tent creeping toward the dark pines and echoes from the wedding’s cover band spilling out over a wet field of grass and the cooling night, coming down indigo.
Up to my shoulders in Lake Superior, what surprised me past the cold rush of it, was how welcome I felt. The water was wild, swell surging like a body that had tides, white caps cresting around my head. I ducked and rolled into them, shoved up from my legs springing against the hard sand below to catch the biggest swells to break around my body, eventually tacking a choppy rhythm so I could breaststroke between each rising wall. Looking down as I went, the water was so clear I saw my arms pulling me forward, the nominal tan my skin’s sucked in this summer set off against the bracing turquoise, weirdly tropical cast of the water so my skin, flushed warm with my blood rising against the chill, seemed to glow.
It was water I’d wanted to swim in for years, so I’m sure that was some of it. But how often do expectations tend to run parallel with outcome, and how rare is it for outcome to lift, howling proud, way beyond what you let yourself picture?
There, with quicksilver clouds that rushed and spread so far from the horizon, past where the eye loses distance to the shore and back behind where the trees started, so the vastness of the place made me feel small and swallowed up, I fought against the urge to keep swimming out. Not toward anything fatalistic, or to claim a connective line only open to me, but because in the rush and roar of the water, flooded by the completely immersive white noise machine of Superior, my head went quiet, my blood thumped around like the tail of a happy dog even as my toes went numb, and when I finally got out, each time I went in, I’d longingly turn back, let my eyes lose focus and feel the dumb, feral pull of it turn my body magnetic. Worse and better things set loose without your even realizing it.