A Swim Across the Snoqualmie River with a Child Not Mine
30 plus and male with baby fever
I’ve got baby fever.
McKenzie has stuck with me for the past 11+ years as I’ve dedicated my life to helping thousands of people tell their stories live. My clients are my children. My artwork has proven utterly fulfilling. I can die happy.
But then last year, a switch flipped.
So we, old hat lovers, drove 3000 miles from Chicago to visit college friends and family. A road trip to outrun post shut in pandemic madness.
I’m touching grass in Seattle’s backyard, Kat’s backyard, Mount Si’s backyard. Si’s immensity proven by the contrast of Little Si, the mountain which rests at its foot.
McKenzie thinks it would be healthy for me to start dating again. The thought is dangerous. One of our few open relationship dealbreakers, “Don’t get anyone pregnant.” No, that’s not quite right. It wouldn’t be worded like that. She’d say, “If you decide to get anyone pregnant, I’ll leave you.”
Sure. Shake on it. Bet.
I didn’t know baby fever happened to men
But two years ago, this Iowa, rustic blond woman back in Chicago, after we broke up, she told me, “You’re a secret normie. You’ve got a normie’s heart.”
Months later, she sat on her Andersonville Chicago couch with me, shoulder to shoulder, and then for a brief moment her head rested peacefully. Like we weren’t lost lovers, confused nincompoops but best friends.
I asked, “What is it like for you… to want children? Can you describe it? Or is it just a vague pull?”
Her answer burrowed into my psyche.
“Dan, it’s like this.
“I have fantasies of conventional life. Where the kids are grumpy and it’s difficult because I’ve got to hold one in my arms while cajoling the other. And my husband is carrying all the luggage as best he can. Then you all make it through the airport terminal and sit down for a second to eat packed sandwiches together.
“There’s a moment of peace. You’re people watching and you’re the people getting watched. That’s family.
“In that mundane domesticated life so many live? There are all these normal moments that don’t seem like magic when you’re a child but they are… and I want to make those moments for my own children. Even if they take them for granted and don’t get it.”
I countered, “Maybe because they take them for granted. Selflessness is part of the magic making.”
The Seattle night sky goes black, stars twinkle and I sneak back into Kat’s cabin in the woods
Tomorrow we are going on a Snoqualmie River stomping adventure. I leave Kat’s backyard and its mountains for a warm guest bed and an already dreaming McKenzie.
Kat and I met in college where she was all sparkle and rosy cheek bombast. Our friendship cemented during an impromptu road trip to Canada her sophomore year.
We haven’t spoken in years but Kat is still all bamboozle and flibbertigibbet. Only it’s hidden in her soul now. The outer exterior is all mom-style. She’s got this clean skin and a deep glow. A sage wisdom.
A five-minute drive. A three-minute walk past noon. And we are at the river’s bend. With us, as we prepare to march in, is her husband, the cannabis lawyer, and her two kids.
Kat’s eldest child, Ella, is eight.
Yesterday Ella created earrings from a 3D Printer Pen. When she saw McKenzie liked them, she told my significant other, “Wait here.” Took the earrings to her bedroom and affixed silver connectors so they were truly functional. Then placed them in a small earring box.
“If you like them, you should have them, if you should have them, they should be a proper gift.”
Children are so good at being adults.
I find myself a perpetual 30-year-old struggling to hold on to a youth that evades me. While secretly pining for that flipped switch, fatherhood. Seeing Ella interact with McKenzie makes me feel like family.
Back at the house Ella had written a poem about life and death and the struggle we go through, scrawled in pastel chalk and posted to the refrigerator it ended, “It’s our mission to fight the darkness but sometimes it’s hard. Sometimes you fail. You get cut off at the knees and die. That’s okay too.”
Oh, the youth I want back! That’s the adult sort-of sentiment I want to share with people now. But it’s also… I’m proud of her for these moments of genius, the way a father might feel. Ella amazes me.
Only here at the river, Ella’s in tears
Her cheeks are anime red and she’s picking up rocks. Throwing them angrily about. “This isn’t the part of the river I wanted to go to!”
She tosses a rock into the water. Then she aims one at her mother, my friend, Kat. She tosses it, splash, hard and big.
Kat raises her voice, then catching my eye, lowers it, “Ella, you do NOT throw rocks — at your mother.”
Looks at me and says, “I don’t know what’s…”
But then her father gentles his husky voice and asks, “Ella, is this because the last time we came here, Uncle Patrick had to save you? Because you weren’t ready for the drop off and you were caught off guard? That was scary, wasn’t it?”
She’s sitting on the rocks now, “Yeah, kinda. But it was Mark who saved me. But really, I just think the other part of the river is bigger and it’s more fun. It’s a better part.”
I’m trying to be a team player, so my shirt is off and I’m in the water. I ask this tiny human to swim with me. Ella, green one-piece swimsuit and matching water shoes, comes in, and acclimates to the chill much faster than I could.
Her father, having articulated what she couldn’t, freed her from frustration. Naming the problem. Speaking it, robs its power over all of us. Suddenly she’s an adult 8-year-old again. And I think, don’t we all go back and forth? We never truly graduate from temper tantrums and regressions.
We all have our throwing rocks in the river moments.
She dares me to swim to a boulder that’s in the middle of the river. A giant calcified tree trunk where we can sit and rest while still soaking up to our waist.
Once there, I challenge Ella
“Let’s swim to the other side.”
She eyes another felled tree trunk on a sandy hill. All we have to do is navigate the rocky beach and we’ll be able to scope the whole forest from its perch.
Before we head off, she says, “I might have you help me, a little.”
She sets her eyes on land, and counts us off, “One, two…” big breath, “Three!” We are off. The water, deep enough that I can’t touch the bottom.
It’s been years since I’ve done more than wade in Chicago’s Lake Michigan.
Now that we are in this Seattle river I notice, it isn’t lazy. The wind blows hard in the opposite direction of the river’s flow. So, the leaf on the surface doesn’t know which way to travel. You can feel the current pushing you below the surface as you try to paddle straight.
Halfway there, Ella asks, “Put out your arm, I need to rest, okay?”
I am treading with my legs and left arm. Cupping heavy water in my palm and leaving my right out for her to steady herself. I can feel her legs scissor to stay in place. Occasionally kick me.
I, never having been in this position before — realize how people die. She is calm, but her weight is real. If she were in any state of confusion or panic, I’d be taken under. Suddenly, with just this little awkward pacing, the river’s current gains power. You want to stay still but you are drifting.
“Okay, I’m ready.” She releases my arm and starts to overhand swim with me toward the shoreline.
Once there, Ella bolts to the giant felled tree atop the lone sand dune. She wants to climb. I am barefoot and she turns her head, crinkles her nose. “Go faster, and it won’t hurt.”
Skeptical, I step from big rock to small rock. Despite being a runner, my feet aren’t callused enough to withstand the pain. So, I teeter step and grimace plod awkward toward our goal.
Ella’s eye roll game is strong. “Here, my feet are tougher than yours. Put these on.” Tosses her tiny wet shoes. I slip them on, wear them like slippers. Shoes for an 8 year old save me.
Once we make it to the tree, we see another adventure. Bridging over a small pool of water is another tree trunk that leads to a bramble of Kudzu blackberry bushes peeping out of the forest.
I point and she agrees, we should fill our bellies. They are luscious and ripe. We test the berries, only pick the ones that, upon a soft tug, fall easily into our palms. Trade with each other when we think we’ve got a particularly good one.
“This one will be delicious! Oh, I knew it.”
When I offer that it’s time, she captures my eye, “Listen, when we get back, let me be the one who tells your girlfriend about the blackberries. I want to make McKenzie jealous she didn’t swim over here with us.”
I am already jealous.
A good kind of jealousy. A grateful, bittersweet. I’ve got friends so I see the paths I didn’t take. Briefly embody a life that can never be mine. For a moment, taste the blackberries that rest in the forest, under the Mama Mountain and just on the other side of a mystical river.
