I don’t know if my parents naturally had more patience than I did, or if they came by their patience through long practice, but they somehow managed to resist the temptation to leave me at a gas station after the hundredth time I asked them, “Are we there yet?” on our annual drive to Lake Nicaboyne in northern Wisconsin.
The lake was, to me, heaven. There was no other place on the planet — or even in the rest of the solar system, for that matter — that I would rather be.
But dad only got two weeks of vacation time each year from his job in the steel mill. One of those weeks he would have to spend working on projects to keep the house from falling down around our ears some windy day. So that left only one week each year for the family to hit the road and aim the station wagon toward a pine-scented rustic cabin in lake-lapped heaven.
If the drive was purgatory for me, it must have been hell for Mom and Dad, because every turn in the road, every exit for gas, every pump of the brakes to slow down for a military convoy on the two-lane highway sparked the same question from me:
“Are we there yet?”
When we finally crunched down the last quarter-mile of sandy lane, rolled past the weathered sign proclaiming “Sunrise Resort,” and lurched over the well-worn roots of familiar pine trees dripping with sticky sap, Dad turned the ignition key to kill the engine, and Mom turned to punctuate the end of the trip by saying, “We’re here!”
But we kids would have spilled out of the car by then, leaving the doors gaping wide as we dashed down to the water’s edge, scattering shoes behind us as we ran.
“We’re here!” we would squeal as our feet hit the water. And for that moment, for the rest of that week, there was no other place but here. Every other place was “there,” and you could take every “there” in the universe, stuff them in a sack, and drop them down a hole. We wouldn’t care.
Because we…were…here!
Oddly, although we traveled to Lake Nicaboyne each year for most of my childhood, that distant Eden lives for me only in memory because I don’t have a single photograph taken there during those years. It may be that we never stood still long enough to be captured on film. Or maybe a lifetime of photos were ruined when the basement flooded some long-ago spring.
Or maybe there was another reason altogether. Maybe Mom and Dad were just as glad as we were to be here. So glad that they lived as fully in the here-and-now moment as we did, and they never felt the need to pick up a camera to prove that we were there.
It would be different today. After all, cameras are everywhere now, and they find their way into every hand for any event, large or small.
Go ahead, look for yourself.
Watch the first pitch of the World Series, and you’ll be blinded by camera flashes, sparking from the hands of fans looking at their cell-phone screen rather than at the guy on the mound.
Tune in to the president’s visit to Main Street America and check out the crowd—dozens of smiling faces staring at the back of their cell phones held high overhead as a world-famous figure walks past.
Call up a replay of the Olympics opening ceremony and watch hundreds of athletes marching in, basking in a moment they have spent a lifetime preparing for. And how do they celebrate that moment? By gazing at a hand-held camera aimed at thousands of their cheering, adoring, envious admirers.
All of them are trading their “we’re here!” moment away, swapping it for a fistful of “we were there” proof. Ask them if they saw the first pitch, saw the president, saw the crowd rise as they entered the stadium, and they will tell you, “Yes, I did!”
But they didn’t see any of those things. Their camera did. What they saw was the back of their camera seeing those memorable things.
I suppose, years later, they will be glad of it. They will be able to pull out the proof, show it to you, and say, “I was there!” And there will be no disputing that they were there.
I have no such proof that I ever visited a heavenly Eden named Nicaboyne. All I have when I close my eyes is the remembered sparkle of lapping waves, the distant laughter of loons, the heady scent of pine sap and outboard motor gas, the feel of sand between my toes, the glisten of water beads on the eyelashes of my first summertime crush, Sandy Petros, as we splashed each other in the shallows.
Would I do it differently today, with cell-phone cameras so handy? I don’t know — maybe I’m still that impatient kid who was willing to trade away “are we there yet?” so completely for “we’re here!” Maybe I still don’t have the patience to spend precious moments today capturing proof that I was there.
I don’t ask “are we there yet?” much anymore. But that doesn’t mean that I have learned patience, only that I am impatient with different things these days.
And my impatience would cause me to ask a different question today.
I would like to be there at the first pitch, at the President’s appearance, at the march into the Olympic stadium, to tap the shoulder of the guy staring at the back of his cell phone and ask him, “Are we here yet?”
Author, musician, and storyteller TR Kerth is a retired teacher who has lived in Sun City Huntley since 2003. Contact him at trkerth@yahoo.com. If you can’t wait for your next visit to Planet Kerth, then get TR’s book, “Revenge Of The Sardines,” available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other online book distributors.
