The Swan is How I Know That I am Alive

The swan is a white blur far out in the pond.  I don’t have my glasses on,  so my friend must confirm that it’s a swan, not a clot of whipped cream mysteriously dropped from the blue sky onto the pond’s surface.   It’s morning, and we are sitting on a wool blanket drinking tea brewed in a cast iron pot.  This is Cape Cod, and this is the second pond of my morning.  This is the moment, the present tense.  The moment is a swan.

~

And this is the future, two days later, sitting in the oncologist’s office, in my jeans and a hospital johnny,  my arms crossed to keep the johnny closed,  my sister in a chair against the opposite wall,  working on her laptop.  As always, Dr. S., as he walks through the door, looks for a split second almost startled, then pleased to see us.  I want to hug him but can’t right now, because if I open my arms, my johnny will open too.  And that would be awkward.  Because suddenly, the spartan, sterile examination room sort of melts around us, and we’re momentarily in another place and situation.  Dr. S. sits down and asks me how I am.  Not as a doctor, but as though he were just a friend.  As though he’s invited us to his house for a visit, and we’re sitting in the living room catching up.  For a moment, we’re just people.  Even though he wears a white doctor coat and there’s a stethoscope dangling from his neck and I’m in this cotton garment of the sick, we’re just talking about life.   All the time we were waiting, anxiety built inside of me.  We waited for almost an hour to see “the Shnip,” as Mara affectionately refers to him.  We always wait a long time here.  But rather than annoy me, I accept it.  Because this is what the Shnip does.  He treats you like you’re the only patient he has.  Or like you’ve dropped in for a visit at the end of his busy day, and he can finally relax and chat for awhile.  I wonder if he’s begun practicing meditation, like his wife.  He’s that present.

~

The swan is coming into focus now.  I want to write “she,” but my friend corrects me.  It is probably a male, his mate tucked into some sedge and cattail indentation in the pond’s shore, sitting on a clutch of eggs.  He patrols the shore always, she says,  describing an all-day all-out battling with danger and potential danger he wages with the lake.  Like the pair of Canada geese we just watched waddle onto the sand several hundred yards away, the pair he is at this moment bee-lining toward.  He is no decorative swan, spinning slow circles, preening, hoping someone takes his picture.  He means business.  His focus is impressive.  His path is direct.  He is intent.

~

Earlier this morning, after I dropped my sister off at work, I drove to Nickerson State Park.  It was unplanned, like this visit with my friend at the swan-pond.  It was spontaneous.  The morning was pure spring, mild, the trees flushed various shades of baby-green and speaking in their spring voices, the voices of newly arriving migrant birds.  On the radio, I heard that people had been spotting indigo buntings, even one rare black-throated sparrow who normally lives in the desert southwest.  I was going to go to the coffee shop to do some computer work, but I cranked the wheel over at the entrance to Nickerson Park, thinking I’d walk around Cliff Pond, to breathe the morning air, maybe write in my journal.  Cliff Pond was my refuge during chemo.  But something pulled me to another trail, a shorter trail around Little Cliff Pond.  In my eight months on the Cape, I never walked that trail.  I was the only person in the parking lot between the two ponds.  I walked the trail,  pushing through a thicket of birdsong.  I found a sandy spot in the woods at the pond’s edge, sat down, and pulled out my journal.  “Time here now on Cape Cod is stacked many layers deep, the moment dense with past time, with memories of when I lived here during treatment.”  It’s disconcerting.  Driving the car down Rte 6A was like swimming through a kelp bed.  So maybe that’s why I walked a new trail, to break out of that viscous sensation of memories knocking around against the present.

~

 I tell the Shnip it really took a full year, like everyone said, after treatment ended, to feel somewhat “myself” again.  “Me and my shadow,” I say,  the new shadow that now hovers at the edge of my sight, cancer and its uncertainties.  He tells me that the shadow will grow paler with time.  I believe him not because he’s worked with countless breast cancer patients over the years, but because his wife is a two-time survivor of breast cancer.  He knows about the shadow.  And I take to the image of a pale shadow.  One day, perhaps, it will become a negative of itself, a ghost print, and when I look into it, what will I see?  What will it show me?

~

The swan is not aiming toward those geese after all.  He is aiming his prominent orange beak, its black nobs, the curve of his forehead, his black eyes, his wings, which my friend observes are never relaxed on his back,  toward us, the two of us on the blanket, with the pot of tea.  I think of a scene in the novel The Snow Child, when the girl Faina battles a swan.   A swan, as graceful and placid as it appears, is a strong, fierce bird.  Its beating wings could break our shins.  We stand, we back away.  The swan does not swerve until he’s almost grounded himself  in the shallows at our feet.  Then he turns, eyes us, pushes back off the sand and begins to forage.  We sit back on the blanket.  This is the moment, the acute moment of the swan acknowledging us, eye to eye. “I see you, I know you are there, I am aware.”   It is how I know that I am alive.

~

An Alaskan friend emailed me this morning of his struggles to not dwell too much in thoughts of mortality.  A survivor of  one kind of cancer many years ago, recently, he’s had surgeries for melanomas.  He’s an athlete, a mountaineer.  He described to me crashing his bike the other day, blood on his smashed helmet, walking his unscathed bike and self 8 miles back to town.  “And I didn’t think about it once,” he said.  Meaning cancer.  It is how he knows he is alive. 

~

The Shnip asks me about Craig, and I tell him it has not been easy on our relationship, cancer and its aftermath, and that only now am I accepting that Craig and I took two separate but parallel journeys.   And everyone, I say, focuses on the cancer patient, and expects partners to be rocks of support.  The Shnip says yes, that is the way it is, there are even support groups for partners for that reason.  And I tell him we are different, that for Craig, the numbers are his rock of Gibraltar.  He is a scientist, I say.  And he goes back again and again to one scene.  When we sat in Dr. S's office that first time, two years ago, Mara, Craig and listening to the NP rattle off my treatment plan.  “We don’t usually provide numbers unless s someone balks at treatment,” she said, but she gave them to us nonetheless,  the way that each kind of treatment halved the chance of recurrence.  And as I sat there, the words and percentages streaming past my ears like twigs in a big, breaking-up northern river, as I sat there ignoring the twigs,  fixating instead on the enormous slabs of ice roiling past, Craig looked like a man who’d just lost everything.  He leaned forward, his elbows on his knees,  face in his big hands.  He looked despairing, but he was doing multiplication and addition in his head.  Chances of recurrence.  Months of treatment.  To those prognostic numbers he’s returned again and again, lobbing them at my fears.  The little sticks bounce off the ice chunks in my head.  “For me,” I tell the Shnip, “The numbers are no Rock of Gibraltar.”

~

 Now the swan tips up its snow-white tail.  It appears to do a headstand, holding the pose for long minutes as it searches the sandy bottom for food.  My friend and I talk, drink tea, the swan feeding within a stone’s throw.  We are suddenly no threat, and I wonder, were we ever?  “I think,” I tell my friend, “some animals are just more social, some more solitary, than others.”  I wonder if the swan is lonely.  I wonder if it feels more secure in the company of other creatures like us.  Why is it feeding right here?  When there’s a whole pond available.  I will never know these things.  And they are not the point.  The swan is the point.  The point of this moment.  Its gleaming black eye.  There are no icebergs here, in this moment.  There is no fear.  No future, no past.

~

In my journal, at Little Cliff Pond, an hour before the visit with my friend at her pond, an hour before the swan, I wrote, “I want to squeeze as much life out of life as I can.  This morning, I am aware, maybe through the birds, and through the distant background hum, a low, human mechanized roar of cars, of the intensity of life, the burning of both candle-ends.  I want to squeeze every drop of life out of life and I want it to squeeze every drop out of me and leave me spent.”

~

“What is your rock?” Dr. S. asks me.  Is this the kind of question an oncologist asks?  Or a friend?

“Writing is my rock,” I say.  “Writing my blog.”

“But isn’t that painful sometimes?” he asks.  “It must be intense, to put those fears down, to go into them, to explore them that way?  Isn’t it harder?”

“No,” I say.  “It’s much harder when I don’t write.  The runaway thoughts in my head are a much worse kind of pain.”

~

The swan is moving gradually away from us now.  While feeding, the wings relax along the torso, but the black feet move separately to balance the tail tipped up as it feeds deeper and deeper.   Now the swan rights himself,  and the wings again assume what appears a position of tension, of defense.   Yet now I see that they also make a basket, a cradle, of the swan’s back, in which cygnets will ride.   The swan swims now for the place where we saw Canada geese earlier.   My friend and I talk about the wild, about the bird songs, about the nature of nature, which is not peaceful, but incessant, focused, intent on survival, on life.  Birds, birds, and the strange birds we are, too, continuously falling off our bikes so we know that we are alive.  Bird hearts beating impossibly fast.

~

We talk a long time, and then it’s time for the Shnip to turn into the doctor again.   “Well, let’s take a look at you,” he says.  I sit on the table, and he presses his fingertips into my neck, my sternum.  “Breathe,”he says, the stethoscope cold on my back.”  I lie down and he taps his fingers on my abdomen, runs them quickly over the numbness of the scar, presses up into my armpits.  “Okay, you can sit up.  You’re the picture of health.  Go ahead and get dressed.”

~

The swan is not a picture of grace or beauty.  The swan is flesh and blood, feathers and beak – real.  The swan is now.  My friend and I gather up the tea pot and cups.  We leave the blanket where it is.  We say goodbye.

In my journal, at Little Cliff Pond, I wrote “Here, the pond asks nothing of me.  It doesn’t even care if I look at it or just sit here staring at my page.  The breeze touches the side of my face and moves on.  The birds territorialize,  a scratchy, whistley, buzzy, chucking, chattering  din, the business and industry of their brief spans of time on earth.  Like me, they live like there is no tomorrow, filled with urgency.  Like me, they are alive only right now.  They’re not peaceful.  Their calls in the forest aren’t sweet music.  Their music is incidental.  They sing work songs, love songs, fight songs.  But still, despite all of this urgency of the earth all around,  and the urgency inside me, I can finally breathe here, alone in the woods, on the pond’s edge.  I can let the incessant ripples of memory and future flow past my ears, like the ripples on the pond itself, heading across the pond, glancing off this beach, on their way to someplace else.  Like the swan, they recognize no edge or ending.  They move forever forward into the next moment.

~  

This is my moment.  It is 1:30 am on my 49th birthday.  I am in bed listening to the rain.  The swan sleeps.   We dream each other.  I am writing these words:  the ice has gone out of the pond.  For this moment, the ice has gone out of my life.