Valerie Tobias
My retirement from community college English instructor began eight weeks into the pandemic.
When people ask what I am doing now, I say I’m getting ready to die — rehearsing my lines for the final act.
“Are you ill?” they ask.
“No,” I say. “Just a slow learner.”
I felt rotten about retiring, abandoning my colleagues to navigate a listing ship through the oily waters of virtual classrooms. But I was weary; I’d been working for 45 years — 25 as a carpenter, then teaching for 20 more. While it was a relief to work indoors in the winter, being an instructor had its own set of challenges. As a latecomer to the academy, I felt like an imposter, mostly due to being a first generation Norwegian American with a working-class background. Then again, I’ve made a life out of sneaking in the back door of workplaces and relationships, signing up, then scrambling to prove myself worthy. It’s like that anxiety dream, suddenly placed on stage with Springsteen, but I don’t know the lyrics. Except this wasn’t a dream; it’s how I lived.
Raising a child is like that, too. Just ask my daughter, ErynDae; each day with her dad was a new revelation. Just where are those instruction manuals, anyway?
When I retired, ErynDae, then 25, had completed college. To celebrate, we took a father-daughter road trip: first, to visit my 93-year-old mom on Long Island, New York, then off to New England in my dead father’s old Ford Ranger — a pre-behemoth-era truck with crank-down windows, manual locks and cigarette burns on the bench seat. From Long Island we caught the ferry to New London, Connecticut.
I love ferries: stepping off solid land as if cutting ties to the past, crossing waters in clean air, the new world a mysterious form on the horizon. Traveling together has always suited ErynDae and me, a pattern begun after her mother and I divorced. Over the years, as we shuttled between homes and soccer and ballet practices, we talked through some of the gnarly bits of her growing up. It beat interrogation-style sessions across a kitchen table.
Like me, ErynDae also appreciates physically wrestling with the world. But whereas I might start climbing a rock face without gear or training, she would first observe skilled climbers from the sidelines, get the right equipment, and then begin. In ballet, she’d actually liked the rehearsals much more than the performance. In college, playing for the ultimate frisbee team, she was one of the smaller and slower players on the team, but her preparedness and fearlessness — seemingly enhanced by her red hair — made up for that. I remember witnessing her make a miraculous, full layout catch, bloodying her elbows. How my heart leapt with pride.
On road trips, even as a young kid, ErynDae was our navigator: interpreting maps — instructing me where to go. Way more fun than GPS. We headed to my sister’s fishing camp in Maine, near the Canadian border. Wilson’s Mills, population 37. Think blueberries and moose. Along the way, we fell into a rolling conversation about my retired life and her new life as a bike mechanic and photographer in Minneapolis. I’m proud of the reflective, ethical and funny person she has become. It was a sweet trip, watching her impress her cousins, uncles and aunts with her poise and joie de vivre.
ErynDae stayed in Maine to visit an old friend, while I drove south alone, back down through Maine and New Hampshire, angling towards Long Island. For the previous few days, Hurricane Henri had been creeping up the East Coast. Now I was driving back into Henri’s orphaned children: intermittent squalls, thunderstorms, flooding rains, and brief stretches of scrubbed-clean, blue skies.
Two hours into the trip, while I was caught in a traffic jam in Massachusetts, one of Henri’s last gasps caught up with me. I’d been tracking a large thunderhead for the previous 10 miles or so and now it was directly overhead. It had all the signs of a tornado: swirling clouds, greenish sky, a sudden shift in atmospheric pressure. But in Massachusetts? Then came the shrieking phone alert. BWAP! BWAP! BWAP! EMERGENCY! A TORNADO HAS TOUCHED GROUND IN YOUR AREA. SEEK SHELTER IMMEDIATELY.
What shelter? Do I abandon the truck, dive into the roadside ditch? Or do I remain loyal to all the other cars creeping ahead like banana slugs? There was no time to answer. A black dome dropped down over the line of cars. Massive raindrops splatted across my windshield. I could barely see the brake lights in the car ahead of me, and I prepared myself to get rammed from behind. Then the truck started shuddering and fishtailing. I was clutching the wheel, trying to hold the truck down. All previously imagined scenarios of dying with grace flew out the window. This was it. The rest of my life would not happen. I would die mangled in the truck’s crumbled body. I wanted to call my daughter, look into ErynDae’s sweet brown eyes, tell her my final I-love-yous, say that I was sorry for having died, leaving her with the hairball of my unfinished life, my life of unpreparedness.
Seconds passed. The air in the cab hummed. Then, its point seemingly made, the tornado retreated. The black shade retracted, and the rain and wind settled, leaving us to creep away down the road like pardoned prisoners. I was trembling and struggling to breathe yet dutifully followed the other drivers as if we were now kin. I was happy they made it, too.
Ten minutes later, I had a funny thought: Here I was, face-to-face with my personal version of the Big Bang, and what was I doing? Instead of expressing gratitude for my life, I was fretting. Panicking. Cursing. Yes, an understandable response, but still, a shallow requiem for an entire life.
For the remainder of the trip, I plodded along in the slow lane and, not until I drove back onto the ferry did I venture a full breath, taking stock of the day. Luckily, I was still here, enrolled as a father, a husband and, hopefully, a touch more humble human being.
Like an evening call to prayer, the ferry horn filled the air as the boat left the harbor behind — another passage on an unknowable sea, the perfect landscape for this slow learner, unprepared, but darn willing to try.
Guy Thorvaldsen is a journeyman carpenter and a retired English instructor from Madison College.
