Die Trying (or, “The Edge of What You Know”)

The edge of things. (Bear Lake, Idaho; 2013)

There is a woman bouncing her baby in her arms, perched on the flimsy wooden deck of a rickety restaurant overlooking the sea. The baby braces himself against his mother’s hip, leans backward, stares out at the horizon. Watches the ocean flow toward him from that straight line at the collision point of water and sky. What do you see when you haven’t been alive long enough to see much of anything? I used to know, but now I’ve seen too much. I don’t remember anymore.

The horizon is a place you can always behold but never touch. I eat my lunch at a table on the sand in the shade of the flimsy deck. I, too, gaze out at that perfect line. The edge of what you know. I suppose I’ve been trying to get there my whole life, peer over the rim, see what only God can see. Now I’m old enough to know I never will. I’ll probably still die trying.

The man who owns the house on the beach where my mother and I are staying has a lung condition. Two or three more years to live. That’s what his doctors say. He wades into his pool that overlooks the sea and watches the water pull the sun down into its bottomless belly. The temperature is just right to melt the blue sky into gold. Kids think it’s magic. Grown-ups think it’s science. When you’re dying, I kind of think you know it’s magic.

I’m walking across the dusky yard to my room. I quietly pause and watch this man stare out at the horizon. I trace his gaze with my own. There’s that impossible frontier. I can’t see past it. I can’t reach it. I know this. The man rests in the water, arms crossed before him on the concrete poolside, considering all of this, the edge of what you know. He considers it for a long, long time.

Dusk deepens into darkness, drapes itself delicately before this man in a pool, pondering the shapeless night, the invisible sea, the hole where the horizon used to be. There are no lines or limits, no edge of anything tonight.

What do you see when you’re almost out of time? Maybe you finally reach the edge of what you know, peer over the rim, see what only God can see. Tonight I can’t behold what the man in the pool does. I’ll probably die trying.

Magic, not science. (Two Medicine Lake, Montana; 2023)