Gould's Proof
During the several days I was editing Elena’s Letters, I was reminded of the poem, Gould’s Proof written years before about summers at Lake Wateree in South Carolina, circling around that same time in my rather peripatetic youth. I hadn’t a clue who I was or where I might end up, but I had several meaningful friendships, including Gabriella–who introduced me to Elena–and whose father is nicknamed the Colonel in the poem. I admired the dude for his quiet manner facing the violence of warfare.
Lake Wateree represents a turning point in my life, an image that’s stayed with me. One of Elena’s letters, answering a comment either I made, or Gabriella one, said Elena was traveling with her family that summer and wouldn’t make it to the lake–which was one of several times in our correspondence that I had hoped we’d finally meet each other.
The remainder of this blog is about the back story on the poem. It’s a fast read.
Gould’s Proof is probably one of the least traditional poems in Love in Winter in that it’s more story than lyric. I’d like to think that it covers a lot of ground, linking things that on their surface are unlikely thematic coconspirators. If you place the image of a confused and wandering youth side by side with Jay Gould’s theory on contingency in evolution, the contrast of the two is supposed to be ironic, small point that it is. The poem attempts with rambling details to make this argument.
The poem begins as an idyll,[1] attempting to capture a common desire of escaping to a better place, even momentarily, then arrives at: we sail / in early August / Caesar’s barge.
Caesar’s barge, as in aggrandized significance, the way we inflate passing events in our lives. It refers to the Roman fleet that sailed Lake Como in the days of the Roman Empire. I came across that fragment in a thin history of Bellagio, while spending a too-brief sojourn in the Italian lake country. Might it also refer to the royal barge King George sailed on the Thames while listening to Handel’s Water Music? Nah, Lake Como’s a cooler image than a muddy English river.
Though, Lake Barcroft doesn’t compare to Lake Como either. It’s missing the Swiss Alps for starters, and there are no Medieval villages hugging its shorelines, just a collection of 50s and 60s vintage houses. And saddest, nothing compared to the streets of Bellagio, he notes wistfully.
Bellagio Street Scene
Most Barcroft folks refer to the pontoon boats as party barges on account of the social gatherings on the lake in the warmer months. Not all go overboard with their celebrations, but midsummer, the action goes on well past dark. The stories that could be told…
Though drifting silently on a midnight lake, stars in a clear sky waiting on the rising moon, being distanced from the urban life that surrounds this modest retreat, this is a special experience. With jets from National, sirens and double-clutching trucks off in the distance, still there is peace in a place touched only by water and air. Having lived for years in urban settings, times when the noise of it all settles into the distance are always memorable.
Pontoon boat is the more technical name, on account of, er, well, the pontoons to keep it afloat. You can find pontoon boats with big Merc outboards pounding across larger water–even in Pamlico Sound’s backwaters on the Outer Banks, though on Lake Barcroft the boats are limited to 5 HP electric engines keeping the noise and the speeds down. Lake Barcroft went electric years ago, before anyone had heard of Elon Musk–though one hardly needs a speed boat to get from one leg of the lake to another in such a modest body of water.
Pontoons were first employed to land planes on water.[2] Considering the slow speeds of early aviation, landing on water seemed less likely to break bones, I’m guessing. OK, not too deeply researched, but that’s my claim for the poem. A biplane mail service to South America flying in and out of Dinner Key (near Coconut Grove) gave Pam Am its start, leading in time to Chalk Airlines’ taking off alongside ocean going cruise boats.
Parenthetically, we took a hydrofoil ferry from Como to Bellagio–hydrofoils being a later evolution of float boats.
The RB-66 was a dog of a jet, marketed for multiple choice uses–converted from a Navy carrier fighter to Air Force ‘reconnaissance’ plane, a slower flying beast the Viet Cong liked to shoot at. And they were not nearly as cool as the Phantoms, the bad ass fighters that some teenagers loved to watch taking off from Shaw AFB in those days. One of the RB-66’s ‘options’ were extra fuel tanks to extend their range. Looked like big bombs turds, only the plane looked close to the same.
So the Colonel took a couple of these extra fuel tanks home, fashioned them into ‘pontoons,’ tested them for holding pressure, welded a steel frame and nailed a wood platform on top, hauled the whole thing to Lake Wateree, itself a manmade creation. The only custom built float anchored on the lake in ten feet of water.
During the early days of the Vietnam war, military dependents were permitted to live in Saigon, before the Viet Cong had so thoroughly infiltrated South Vietnam. When Gabriella’s family finally returned stateside, they were accompanied by a Vietnamese mutt, (gifted as a puppy–with the joke being it was meant as a meal not a pet). She was an unflappable black and white mutt a bit like a border collie whose favorite perch was beside the ski boat’s outboard motor. Far as I know, she never fell off. True story.
Jamie’s father–another fighter jock–could deftly launched from the float, flop hat, lit cigarette and beer in hand, and could return the same way, perhaps with a little less beer than when he started. Jamie said he’d learned to sky in Puget Sound where the water discouraged any but beach starts.
By freshman year in college, we boys were growing out our hair, smoking stale grass and listening to 60s rock and roll. Several of our crew later served in the military, one as a fighter jock, another in artillery and a third as a medic.
What connects these fragments is how they’ve touched a life, and touched several friendships. Ordinary enough moments happening to ordinary people. If I’d never swum to a float, would I have wanted to pursue living by water? Would I be as drawn to the ocean? And would any of this matter – other than becoming seeds for a poem’s images?
The poem concludes by returning to Lake Barcroft and the two huskies who’d come from their own contingencies, finally engaging Jay Gould: he claims contingency and the poem claims ridiculous happenstance.
I wrote the poem in late summer of that first year–toward the end of the poetry cycle after Ryan’s death. While the poem is about my own coming of age, as with everything written that year, I held his in memory. My life since Lake Barcroft is in large part my life after Ryan.
[1] “A short poem, descriptive of some picturesque scene or incident, chiefly in rustic life.” OED
[2] The first successful (i.e. didn’t sink) floatplane was built by a Frenchman in 1910. A Minnesota farmer built the first pontoon boat in 1939. QED.