The job you are given (2019)

Imagine a doublewide mobile home swept away in a flood and still floating down the Mississippi River on a sunny Fourth of July weekend, past families in small motorboats, tents pitched on sandbars, and barges as long as city blocks. Now picture this floating mobile home with two outboard engines on the back and a steering wheel behind the picture window in the living room. This is a houseboat. Fourteen of us stand in an open circle that curves from the couch to the kitchen island, looking past the wheel and ahead through the picture window. My mother, my sisters, and I. Their husbands, my wife, and seven children fighting seven orange lifejackets with their chins. A stranger stands at the wheel, turning back to talk to us. My sisters and I wait side by side behind him, as if any one of us might step forward. The small motorboats, the tents, and the barges lie ahead. In our wake lies the marina where we rented this boat. We have begun what the company calls our training cruise.

More than thirty years after our father died and more than ten years before I get sick, our mother has just turned seventy. Her birthday falls in February. Most years, Mandy does the work of deciding what to give her. One year, Mandy suggested giving her a weathervane for the cupola on her barn. Which we did. Then I spent two weekends in April, standing on the ridge of the barn roof or straddling the peak of the cupola, installing it.

Mandy felt guilty, as if her idea had robbed me of two Saturdays and two Sundays that spring. Emily felt it was the kind of project I would have done anyway. And she was right. I watched the fields turning green up there and the trees leafing out on both sides of the valley. Isabelle, who was nine at the time and loved heights, spent many hours sitting on the roof and handing me tools, and Suzanne spent only a small fraction of those hours standing on the bridge and watching us worriedly.

When our mother turned seventy, we started wondering how many years we had left with her, and Mandy suggested that we give her a trip. We would all go somewhere together, and she could decide where. We knew wherever we went would involve horses or rivers. None of our spouses could ride and most of the children were too young for horses, so we ended up here in a houseboat on the Mississippi, between Wisconsin and Minnesota. Emily had found the company online.

The only model that accommodated all fourteen of us was a boat so large and so ostentatious that the rental company named it The Trump. It had six bedrooms, a kitchen that felt like it belonged in a McMansion, and a rooftop bar with a hot tub and a water slide into the river. Isabelle, the oldest, was now eleven. Emily’s daughter was a year younger. Everyone else was under seven. While still in the dock, Mandy and Suzanne were putting away groceries in the kitchen. They could hear the marine radio next to the steering wheel. My wife has a very expressive face. Mandy noticed her face and then heard what she was hearing. A child had just drowned nearby. Mandy’s twins were barely two and very active. In the back of the boat, past the kitchen, a door opened right out to a deck above the water.

The company didn’t require us to prove we had boating experience. So we assumed driving the boat was easy. If they let us take The Trump for four days and five nights, after a forty-five minute training cruise, how could it be hard? As soon as the trainer pulled the boat away from the dock, we knew we were wrong. We know it even more now. We stand a few steps back from the trainer, my sisters and I. The further out into the river we go, the larger that space becomes until we hear him asking us, “Who’s in charge? Did you decide who’s in charge?”

No one answers.

He asks again, glancing over his shoulder at me.

“I think we all are,” I say. “The three of us.” But I step toward him. “We’re doing this together.”

“No,” he says flatly. He is quiet and calm but absolutely definite. “One person has to be in charge.”

I take another step toward him without realizing it. Both of my sisters are behind me now. When I turn to consult with them, they are pointing at me. “He’s in charge,” Emily says.

And I step to the wheel. The trainer points across the window. “Steer toward that island.”

The island lies off the left side of the boat. I turn the wheel left. Nothing happens. I turn it more and still nothing happens. I turn it more and even more until the boat finally starts moving left. As the bow of this broad, flat-bottomed boat swings around toward the island, I try to straighten it out. I turn the wheel right. Nothing happens. I keep turning the wheel right and the boat keeps turning left until I have to crane my neck back to see where I originally intended to go. Again the boat finally starts turning right, but again I can’t straighten it out, and again the bow swings past the island. And so it goes. I steer an enormous, staggering serpentine down the Mississippi, like a drunk walking a double yellow line late at night.

“You’ll figure it out,” the trainer says. “It just takes some practice.”

He repeats this a half an hour later as he vaults into a smaller boat and leaves us on our own.

We traveled for a few days upstream and then traveled for a few days back downstream. Locks and dams made that part of the Upper Mississippi almost like a lake in places. Near the center of all this water ran a navigation channel, marked by buoys: Green on your left and red on your right as you head upstream. The channel was heavily dredged, but shallow water spread broadly, sometimes for hundreds of yards, outside the buoys. Across this wide expanse of shallow water lay the sand from dredging the channel, piled in dunes and beaches.

Every morning delivered beautiful blue summer weather. Each day passed cruising in the channel. The boat had a second steering wheel on the roof, and most of that time we spent together up there. Here we could take turns driving. My sisters and my brothers-in-law drove, as well as my mother.

Basking in being on the river, she spent hours asking questions that no one could answer about the hydraulics of currents and eddies or the geology of the low hills on the shore. She identified trees and various grasses. She was constantly handing binoculars to a grandchild and pointing out a great blue heron or a bald eagle or a red-tailed hawk or a stack of turtles sunning themselves on a log. “Grandma! Look, Grandma! Barges!” the kids would cry, because they knew she loved watching them pass.

When it was time to stop for the night, we found a beach and ran the bow of the houseboat up onto the sand. Except that makes it sound simple. Rows of rocks called wing dams extended out from both shores to the edge of the channel. The Army Corps of Engineers built these walls to concentrate the current in the center of the river and reduce the number of times the channel had to be dredged. Wing dams once rose above the level of the river, but now they sit just below the surface. Buoys mark the end of most of them. Most of them appear on navigation charts. To reach any beach we saw, we had to guide the boat between these rows of submerged walls without knowing where they all were.

We are a family that knows how to do things together. While sugaring and doing other projects at the farm, we learned how to split up tasks and help each other get a job done. Mandy’s husband Livy read the charts. We would see a beach outside the channel, across some broad expanse of shallow water, and cruise past it. Still on top of the boat, Livy would study the chart and then take the wheel so I could study it as well.

Then we turned around in the channel and cruised past the beach again, pointing out the buoys that marked the wing dams and locating each one on the chart. We would turn around a second time and pass the beach again, planning what path we would take and scouring the water for any ripple that might reveal a wing dam that had not been marked. Then we turned around a third time, and I started to sweat. Sweating, I took a sharp, ninety degree turn out of the channel and drove straight for shore.

The beach often lay a hundred or even two hundred yards from the channel, and it felt like miles. I drove downstairs again by this point, staring grimly out the picture window. Emily’s husband Bob stood at the bow and measured the depths and shouted the numbers back to me. Livy and Emily waited on either side of him, their hands on two large anchors. Mandy’s twins kept breaking free and bolting for that door at the back of the boat, the one that opened onto a deck above the water. Suzanne kept the rest of the kids quiet.

My knuckles white on the wheel, my shoulders hunched, I braced for the sound of a wing dam tearing a hole in the bottom of the boat. The numbers Bob kept shouting told me how far we would sink. Or maybe a wing dam would destroy the propellers, and we would drift downstream. Or maybe we would get stuck on a wing dam, halfway between the channel and the shore. I pictured The Trump pirouetting on the rocks and myself calling for help on the marine radio and then listening to the voices of people who had lived their lives on this river and couldn’t believe that a man—a grown man—had just steered his family—I mean, his whole family, wife, children, mother, sisters, husbands, nieces and nephews—into so much trouble.

Then having waited so long to reach the shore, it was suddenly there. A dune and a beach filled the picture window. The measurements Bob shouted were growing smaller and smaller. “We’re going to hit!”

Now the rasp of the hull coming to a stop. Emily leapt off one side of the bow, and Bob handed her the anchor. Wading onto the beach, she ran as fast as she could upstream and sunk the anchor into the sand, while the wind caught the side of The Trump like a sail and the stern started pivoting toward shore. As soon as she planted her anchor, every free hand on the boat pulled the rope tight to keep the boat straight. Livy was wading out of the water now and running down the beach with a second anchor. Once his rope was pulled tight, I threw the boat into reverse and buried both anchors into the sand. We were done. I shut off the engine. We counted the children. I still stood at the wheel, my hands shaking and my shirt soaked with sweat.

“Are you okay?” Mandy would ask.

“I’m okay. I just need a minute.”

“You need a drink.”

“I probably do.”

Like cruising in the channel on the top of the boat, the evenings were everything I wanted from a family summer vacation. The kids played on the dunes.

We often made a fire on the beach. Here Emily, who always appreciates the shortest distance between two points, supplied us with chairs.

I made a point of not being in charge of anything as soon as the engine shut off, and I focused on being grateful that we had all managed to get away together like this.

Sitting in that circle on the beach and looking at an empty chair, I imagined what my father would have thought of our day. That we could show up and present a credit card and drive a boat like this into the middle of the Mississippi without any qualifications at all would have amused him. He would have had fun precisely because he didn’t know how to do it. He would not have suffered the same intense pain about every mistake as I did.

“You look tired,” my mother might say.

“You do look tired,” Emily might say.

“I’m sorry you ended up being in charge of the boat,” Mandy almost always said. “I feel guilty.”

I denied how stressed I felt, but I woke up at night dreading leaving shore again.

In the morning, we had to back the boat straight out between the wing dams into the channel. I steered from the living room. But I couldn’t see where we were going. A kitchen and four bedrooms stood between the wheel and the window at the back of the boat. Bob stood on the back deck and gave me directions. But I couldn’t hear what he was saying. The boat was eighty feet long. So Isabelle and Emily’s oldest, Caroline, became our messengers.

Bob didn’t always communicate clearly. And I didn’t always remain calm. Poor Isabelle or Caroline would run some cryptic message back to me. I would snarl a question for Bob that she would have to carry back to him, and he would snap at her, and she would bring that back to me until he was standing in the hallway yelling at me and I was yelling at him. Then finally we were back in the channel and back on the top of the boat, cruising peacefully. But all I could think about were two things: Beaching again the next night, and how much shame and humiliation we would endure at the next lock.

“It didn’t get easier,” Suzanne observed later. “I kept expecting it to get easier for you. But it only got harder every day.”

A lock is like a box that fills or empties with water. You motor in through one gate while the gate ahead stays shut. Then the gate you came through closes your boat inside the box. Once both gates are closed, you have to shut off your engines. As the water empties or fills, a current pulls the boat toward one of the gates. Someone drops a rope down, and you hold the boat against one wall. Walkways circle the walls of the box above you. The railings up there always seem lined with faces, waiting for something to go wrong.

The first time we went through a lock, nothing did. The last time, going downstream, the rope broke as the current rushed out through the gates. Then The Trump went floating away from the wall, spinning into the center of the box, because the engines had to be off and I had no control over the boat. Panicked, I couldn’t decide whether to turn the engines on. We spun closer to the opposite wall while the crowd at the railing stared open mouthed as if we were a scene from movie. I started the engines just before the bow smacked into concrete. Then the two halves of the downstream gate opened, and I managed to drive between them without hitting either side.

Then it was the last day. We had beached for the last time and backed off the beach for the last time, and I was steering toward the marina, sweating. Chaos in the lock had made me terrified of docking. I kept playing a loop of The Trump in slow motion, splintering the dock, crushing small motorboats, and sinking another houseboat in its path. Wasn’t there a restaurant built out there? I pictured someone raising coffee to her lips and then glancing up to see the prow of the boat in the plate glass window. Yelling and screaming. Men diving into the water. Then later the insurance adjustor. And the accident exceeding some maximum on our policy.

But the dock lay in the same direction we were already traveling, and it was almost like pulling to a curb. As we eased up alongside it several guys came to help, grabbing the boat as I reversed, and The Trump came to a stop. I shut off the engines. As I stood there thinking now I am done and I never have to do this again, an employee boarded the boat and came up behind me. He pointed across the harbor to a dock loaded with gas tanks and fuel pumps. “We have to fuel up. Your family can unload over there.” Then he saw my face. He sighed and said he would do it. I stood beside him while he steered the boat and I saw a familiar tension, a certain helplessness, in his back and shoulders. We docked again. He shut off the engine again. And he sighed, “God, I hate driving these fucking things.”

A couple months later, at the beginning of fifth grade, Emily’s daughter Caroline wrote a story about our houseboat trip. “Some guy explained how to drive the boat,” she remembered. “Uncle Doug got stuck driving it. I say ‘stuck’ because he had no idea what he was doing half the time.”

Surviving my father was like being pilot of that boat. This was how it felt to take his place, from the time I was a teenager and for decades afterward. But this is also just the experience of being an adult. You commit to responsibilities without understanding them. You are never the right person for the job you are given. Kissing cheeks and shaking hands at your wedding, you don’t understand the work of being married. That first day home with an infant who can’t hold up her own head. What do you know about raising a child? Or the day you close your office door and sit down behind your desk with a new job you thought you wanted. You are so unqualified. You are so unprepared. You have to learn in public, and it only gets harder—or it only gets harder for a long, long time.