I don’t want to brag, but at the Alabama State Academic Decathlon of 1994, I was the Lionel Messi of C students. I won seven medals—four of them gold—out of a possible ten events. I won a bronze medal in math, even though that year I received a D in precalc. Admittedly, none of my scores would’ve gotten me into the top ten among A or B students, but I wasn’t competing against them. For the first time in my academic life, I felt like I wasn’t an idiot.
I won gold medals in topics I thought I sucked at—like literature and history—and also one in speech, which was especially surprising because I’d always been a poor public speaker. I hated my voice, the way it betrayed my omnidirectional anxiety, and I’d done terribly in debate competitions. But with AcaDec, I’d found a place where I could flourish. Our school won the state competition, which meant we’d qualified for nationals, to be held that year in a hotel ballroom in Newark, New Jersey.
Over the next few months, my growing academic confidence, combined with study skills learned from Todd, meant that my grades started to improve. I was briefly at risk of losing my coveted C-student status until I realized I could tank physics to keep my GPA below 3.
That April, the nine of us and our coaches flew up to Newark. We made friends with other nerds from around the country, including a C student from the Midwest whose name was, I think, Caroline. She had a good fake ID and managed to smuggle a twelve-pack of Zimas to us.
Todd was one of the leading A students at nationals, and our little team from Alabama ended up finishing sixth in the nation. I even won a couple of medals. One was in speech. My speech was about rivers. I don’t remember much about it, but I think I talked about meanders—the serpentine bends in a river’s course. I’ve loved rivers ever since I can remember. I spent part of one summer with my dad on the Noatak River in northern Alaska, and another paddling the French Broad River in Tennessee.
The idea for the speech was stolen from Todd. We were sitting on the banks of a creek one September afternoon, the air thick and mosquito-laden, and Todd told me that what he liked about rivers was that they kept going. They meander this way and that, but they keep going.
* * *
It’s April of 2020. I am a long way downstream from that hotel ballroom in Newark. All morning, I’ve been trying to help my kids with e-learning, but I worry I only make it worse for them with my impatience and exasperation. I’m stressed about work, even though my work is absurdly inessential. At noon, the Indiana State Department of Health updates its Covid-19 dashboard with grim news. As the kids eat lunch, I read the updates on my phone. Sarah comes downstairs, and we go to the living room so she can tell me about a friend of ours who is hospitalized. The news is good—our friend is recovering—but I can’t feel any joy about it. There is only dread. She can see it in me, I think, because she says, “Why don’t you walk over to the river?”
* * *
These days, I can only feel normal when I’m outside. I am writing this now on the west bank of the White River here in Indianapolis. I brought a camping chair down here. I am sitting atop a grassy berm, and my laptop’s battery has plenty of power. Before me, the river is a muddy, flooded cacophony. Every minute or two, an uprooted tree comes barreling downriver. In a dry summer, I can walk across this stretch of river without ever getting my shorts wet, but now it’s fifteen feet deep and churning.
For days now, my brain has refused to allow me to finish a thought, constantly interrupting with worries. Even my worries get interrupted—by new worries, or facets of old worries I had not adequately considered. My thoughts are a river overflowing its banks, churning and muddy and ceaseless. I wish I wasn’t so scared all the time—scared of the virus, yes, but there is also some deeper fear: the terror of time passing, and me with it.
I brought a Terry Tempest Williams book with me, but the omnipresent worry makes it impossible to read for more than a few minutes. Scanning through the book, I find a passage I highlighted years ago. “When one of us says, ‘Look, there’s nothing out there,’ what we are really saying is, ‘I cannot see.’”
* * *
From here, the White River will flow into the Wabash River, and then into the Ohio, and then into the great Mississippi River, and then into the Gulf of Mexico. Even after that, it will keep going—freezing, melting, evaporating, raining, flowing, being neither created nor destroyed. Looking out at this river reminds me of sitting at the edge of that creek with Todd, and how his love helped carry me through those years, and how in some ways it is still carrying me.
I wonder if you have people like that in your life, people whose love keeps you going even though they are distant now because of time and geography and everything else that comes between us. Todd and I have both floated down through the decades—he’s a doctor now—but the courses of our lives were shaped by those moments we shared upstream. As Maya Jasanoff wrote, “A river is nature’s plotline: It carries you from here to there.” Or from there to here, at least.
Outside, the world continues. The river, even overflowing its banks, still meanders. I glance from my laptop screen to the river, then back to the screen, and then to the river. For no reason I know, a memory coalesces: After the Academic Decathlon competition in Newark was over, we ended up with our Zimas on the roof of that hotel—Todd and me and a couple of our teammates. It was late at night and New York City glowed pink in the distance. We were the sixth best Academic Decathlon team in the nation, we were getting just the right amount of utility out of our Zimas, and we loved each other. Rivers keep going, and we keep going, and there is no way back to the roof of that hotel. But the memory still holds me together.
I give the Academic Decathlon four and a half stars.
SUNSETS
WHAT ARE WE TO DO about the clichéd beauty of an ostentatious sunset? Should we cut it with menace, as Roberto Bola?o did so brilliantly, writing, “The sky at sunset looked like a carnivorous flower”？ Should we lean in to the inherent sentimentality, as Kerouac does in On the Road when he writes, “Soon it got dusk, a grapy dusk, a purple dusk over tangerine groves and long melon fields . . . the fields the color of love and Spanish mysteries”？ Or perhaps we should turn to mysticism, as Anna Akhmatova did when she wrote that in the face of a beautiful sunset,
I cannot tell if the day
is ending, or the world, or if
the secret of secrets is inside me again.
* * *
A good sunset always steals the words from me, renders all my thoughts as gauzy and soft as the light itself. I’ll admit, though, that when I see the sun sink below a distant horizon as the yellows and oranges and pinks flood the sky, I usually think, “This looks photoshopped.” When I see the natural world at its most spectacular, my general impression is that more than anything, it looks fake.
I’m reminded that in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, tourists would travel around with darkened, slightly convex mirrors called Claude glasses. If you turned yourself away from a magnificent landscape and looked instead at the landscape’s reflection in the Claude glass, it was said to appear more “picturesque.” Named after seventeenth-century French landscape painter Claude Lorrain, the glass not only framed the scene but also simplified its tonal range, making reality look like a painting. Thomas Gray wrote that only through the Claude glass could he “see the sun set in all its glory.”