Travel Stories
The Book at the Bottom of the Lake
by George Bailey
In his final weeks our father told me and Hansel about a book he’d devoted two decades of his life to writing. He said it was a sonnet cycle about his courtship with our mother, “among other things”. Our father was always a cryptic man. —All our lives he forbade us to use the verb to be on Mondays. During the Christmas season we were only permitted to ask yes or no questions. And I suppose the linguistic character of so many of his rules should have signaled to us a literary passion.
However, even his literary endeavors weren’t free from his strange impositions. The issue of meter aside—we could know nothing about that without having read the actual work—our father, it turned out, had locked the manuscript inside of an air-tight chest and dropped the chest into Table Rock Lake.
Initially, Hansel cared less about retrieving our father’s purported, by
now watery, opus than I did. Not because he doubted its reality. He simply figured if our father had seen fit to dispose of such a thing in such a way, he had his reasons. True enough, I supposed. Our father was such an enigmatic man—in large part due to his disinterest in words. He rarely spoke unless spoken to and even then he got the job done quickly. I had never believed he was silent for want of something to say; he was an eager, even anxious, man. I knew plenty went on inside his head and, now, given the opportunity to find out what, I was as restless as a kid on Christmas morning. I wanted the pages.
Getting Hansel and mother to join me wasn’t all that difficult. Hansel had moved back in with her after losing his teaching job. They had agreed it would be a temporary thing, yet now they’d been there almost two full years. He badly needed to breathe some new air. And mother wasn’t going to mourn in the same house in which father did. It was a big house—much of which he had built himself—and she couldn’t occupy it by herself.
We were not travelers. Born and raised just outside of Richmond, none of us had ever been west of Pennsylvania. I had envisioned a quick trip—probably get a room at Motel 8 since that was the only thing I guessed would be affordable—take care of business and move on. Of course, a significant obstacle in the way of such a hasty protocol was the business itself. None of us were sure how exactly we would get to the bottom of the lake itself. Optimist that I am, I was ready to deal with that once we made it to Branson, but Hansel, who trusts the world’s facility for accommodation less than I do, was not going to lean so heavily on chance. One day we were in town window-shopping and brainstorming when he ran into an old friend of his who does a lot of traveling—and he is the one who recommended The Travel & Vacation Network to us. We went online to check it out as soon as we got home.
Hansel became visibly excited by the host of attractions in Branson. Shows, restaurants, and the lake itself, which turned out to be quite beautiful. We reserved a room at Red Bud Cove, a quaint Bed and Breakfast near Table Rock Lake, and booked tickets for a flight leaving that weekend…
Hansel, Mother and I took a day or so to settle in. Our first morning in Branson, Hansel asked the manager at Red Bud Cove about the possibility of finding a diving guide, and we called the number she gave us that afternoon.
A warm, seasoned but still sprightly voice picked up the other end of the line.
“I’m looking for a scuba diving guide who will show me around Table Rock Lake,” I said.
“What do you want to see the bottom of the lake for?” he asked.
I’ve discovered that the more improbably one’s motives are, the more effective frankness is. I told him the truth. I said:
“Well, I have reason to believe a sheaf of my late father’s poems are somewhere at the bottom of this lake.”
He made a noise that seemed to come from the base of this throat.
“Poetry!” he grunted. “I’ve never seen any poetry down there, but… Well, alright…” And we scheduled a date for later that week.
In the meantime Hansel, Mother and I decided we might as well take in the sights. Mother insisted on a trip to 57 Heaven and showed us our father’s dream car—a 57 Studebaker. We ate burgers at Dick Clark’s American Bandstand grill and then saw the Liverpool Legends. I’ve always suffered from a Beatles block. I like the songs well enough but I’ve just never felt them as strongly as the rest of western civilization seems to. Even so, sitting between my brother and my mom, all that was left of our family, I rocked a little side to side as these guys started in on Across The Universe. I suddenly felt more at home than I had in years. Even though I was surrounded, for the most part, by strangers, there was a sense of calm that had never been able to exist in our house, as much as it meant to me.
Hansel is afraid of the water and he accompanied Mother on a ride in the Branson Balloon the morning I met up with my guide. It turned out his name was Frank. Frank had lived in Branson all his life. Though his career as a diver had taken him up and down both coasts of the United States, he said there wasn’t any water he enjoyed more than these Midwestern lakes.
My gear was heavier than I’d anticipated. It was a bit of a struggle even to sit up as we drifted out in the boat. Frank asked me if my father had said what part of the lake he’d left the book. He had not. Frank got a kick out of this as it turned out Table Rock Lake is a lot bigger than I had realized. We wouldn’t be able to search the whole thing in a day.
“Well,” he said. “Your guess is as good as mine.”
He donned his mask and signaled for me to do the same. And from that moment on I didn’t think about the book my father had written. I decided, I suppose, that I did not have enough time left to keep on tangling myself in my father’s schemes. For the first time in a decade, I didn’t think about anything at all as I shifted to the edge of the boat and readied myself for the plunge.