April 27, 2024
Contagious Emotions
I woke up with sore muscles from working out on the trails. The morning sky was cloudy, and all the patio furniture was wet with dew. We still took our coffees outside, standing at the deck’s railing, looking out into the forest. Deep in the woodland, I heard the faint chatter of several songbirds. By the time I finished my coffee, the birds in the backyard had also awakened.
After morning chores and a writing session, my wife and I packed up to go to Lake Wilson. On the way, we stopped by Armando’s pizzeria and picked up a medium pepperoni pizza, cheese bread, and two drinks, hauling them with us to the lake. The owner of the restaurant seemed frenzied, almost panicked after receiving a large order over the phone. He kept running around in circles, starting, but not finishing tasks. His frazzled demeanor made us feel awkward. Once our pizza was ready, we were more than ready to get out of the place.
When we arrived at Lake Wilson, it was relatively quiet. A few people were fishing from the main pier, so we carried our food to a nearby picnic table and ate. The pizza was excellent, so good in fact, that we decided the owner was doing alright. The pizza seemed to redeem the stressful environment he created. We had no idea that negative emotions would overshadow the day, and the pizzeria would be a piece of cake compared to what was about to happen.
After we finished eating, we threw away our trash and grabbed our rods and reels out of my SUV. Then we walked to an area on the west side of the lake to do a little fishing. A large patch of grass had grown underwater on this side of the lake, so every time we reeled in our line, we had to remove grasses from the hook and crimped weights. This got old pretty quickly. My wife saw the main dock next to the boat ramp had cleared, so we grabbed our things and headed that way.
We found a nice place on the wooden dock and resumed fishing. Another man was there, and we later found out he was from Sherman, Texas, and had lived in Wichita Falls and El Paso, too. It was always nice to run into a fellow Texan. When we were about ten minutes into fishing, a truck pulled up, backing an old boat down the ramp about ten feet away. I thought nothing of it, but then I heard a man yelling at someone. He said, “Why do you have to be such a goddamned bitch? You always make everything so difficult.” I felt bad the man was yelling this at his wife, who was backing the truck up, but my wife later told me the man was not talking to his wife. He was talking to his daughter, who was about seven or eight years old. She also told me the father, who was about six and a half feet tall and weighed at least three hundred pounds, had shoved his little boy, who was barely older than his sister.
The family had a rambunctious chocolate Labrador retriever who was dragging around the mother. They spilled the dog into the boat and then the man was off and gone. The wife told us he was testing out the boat because it had stalled on him during a recent trip to a different lake. She tried to make everything seem like it was normal, but the family’s behavior was so awkward that everyone hoped the man’s boat would stall, preferably at the bottom of the lake. The man returned, and they loaded up the boat and were gone, but they left everyone on the dock feeling angry. I remembered in that moment how much I hated shitty people.
We began talking to the man on the pier and kept fishing. I caught eight or nine bluegills while my wife sat with her fishing pole, not really trying to catch anything. She spotted a snake in the water and went to inspect it. I followed, wanting to grab a photograph. It was a venomous cottonmouth with its head poking out of the water. The top half of the snake’s body was visible, but the rest of it disappeared into the murk. We stared at each other for a bit and then it shot under the water and grasses about a foot off the bank. I made a note not to dangle my feet over the dock. When my wife spotted the snake, it was about to make its way from the water up one of the dock’s pillars. This was the first snake we saw for the new spring season.
The temperature had warmed, and we were getting hot, so we packed up our gear, headed to the truck, and then drove to Culver’s, cooling off with some ice cream. Before heading home, we made a quick stop at Harris Teeter to pick up some new beers. There was Juicy Rapids Hazy IPA by Deep River Brewing Company in Clayton, North Carolina. And from Southern Pines Brewing Company in Southern Pines, North Carolina, we bought their Man Of Law American IPA and Duck Hook Blonde Ale. We arrived home tired from the eventful morning.
My wife suggested I take a quick nap, so I headed out into the pasture where we had a hammock set up under some pines. I got into the hammock and dozed off for about an hour, sleeping better than I had in several years. There was something about being out in the open, hearing the wind blow through the trees and the birds sing, feeling the cool breeze and warmth of the sun. And the feeling of swaying while being suspended put me in a mental state that allowed me to drop away. When I woke up, I understood why my wife came to this place to nap.
I walked through the pasture back to the house and made a cup of coffee to wake up. After, I took a shower and put on a tee shirt, shorts, and flip-flops, and met my wife on the deck for an amazing salad for dinner. We made a fire, and sat outside talking about how great our time off had been, and about the upcoming week. Even though we still had one more day off, we understood Sunday would be a day of preparation for my wife’s trip away from home and my return to work. I stayed out a little longer by the fire while my wife took a hot bath. After, she went to bed while I took a quick shower to rinse off the smell of smoke.
Before falling asleep, I thought about our experience of witnessing an abusive father manhandle his family. In a perfect world, most people would envision helping the wife, saving the kids, and punishing the father, all while keeping out of harm’s way. The reality of the situation was different, however. There were no guarantees of safety, so the first choice we had to make was whether to risk our own security in order to fix other people’s problems. My wife’s safety took priority over any of those people, so I stayed disengaged from the situation. This kept my family and me safe, which achieved our goal. But seeing how the family functioned left me with a feeling of injustice. My wife and I talked about the situation while sitting by the fire, and we recognized how negative emotions were contagious and how life was not always fair. Some times, being human with other humans was hard.