Flip Pond

Alexander Trappings’ favorite time of day is the early morning. Really, it’s the only time he cares about. It’s life before death. He purposefully rises before his wife, Ruth, and prepares his large morning French press. Black coffee. Straight to the point. No adulterants. And with the steeping, freshly ground beans he also steeps himself, in some combination of his own and others’ imaginings and ruminations.

He reads, and journals, and is inspired by others to write the stories and revisit and continue to develop the ideas that had been such an impassioned part of his youth. In these sacred moments the interminable spirit of his youth survives. Vitality incarnate. He, like the eloquence of the mastered English and the ideas those masters encircled, is briefly everlasting.

Then his wife will rise, well-intentioned, conditioned to the responsibilities of modern life, and remind him of his own. The real world. The world that forgot that she once wanted to be a painter, back when they smiled easily, happily impoverished, and when she lazily dreamed of the perfect vistas to put to canvas.

He was once a dreamer too. A romantic. A philosopher-poet whose ideas and flights of fancy soared far above this dreary, mechanized and impartial world of work and maintenance. No more.

As Ruth ambles into the kitchen, intruding upon his short-lived otherworldliness, he feels the ethereal glow fade, drifting away with the last of the drippings from the French press. Yet he has the urge to preserve it. ‘One more sip, please,’ he silently pleads to the gods.

“May I read you a passage from Lady Chatterley’s Lover?,” he beseeches her.

Ruth, barely awake, sits and stares at him blankly, incredulously, as if disbelieving that such a creature, a ponderer, and such a pastime, the reading of literature, might yet coexist with today.

Alex reads to his wife from D.H. Lawrence’s early twentieth century classic: “The England of today is producing a new race of mankind, over-conscious in the money and social and political side, on the spontaneous, intuitive side dead – but dead! Half-corpses, all of them: but with a terrible insistent consciousness in the other half.” He scans a bit down the page, then continues: “Ah, God, what has man done to man? What have the leaders of men been doing to their fellow men? They have reduced them to less than humanness; and now there can be no fellowship anymore! It is just a nightmare.”

“He’s speaking of England’s transition from agrarian to industrial society, but it feels like he could be speaking of today, doesn’t it?” Alex stares at his wife, the woman he’s lived with for a decade now, and says a silent, desperate prayer: ‘Please let that register on some level! Something, anything… feel even an ounce of the ton it drops upon my consciousness! I beg you!’

Ruth’s eyes flitter about. She’s moving through the beginning of her day before actually taking the steps. All that matters is what you do, don’t you know! What you make. What you bring home.

“I really do wish that you’d give up on some of these… imaginings of yours, sweetie,” she finally offers. “I feel like they’re becoming too much of you lately. Like they’re taking over too much of your mind. The world is the way it is.”

Alex feels another fissure form in his heart. He lives a life of gruesomely gradual heartbreak, one crack forming at a time, each widening a bit every day. One day he’ll implode, and there’ll be nothing left but duty. How is it that the trap is formed, he wonders? Ever so steadily. At first it feels much like love, or at least attachment, or at least comfortability; something that must be built and maintained around one’s ‘significant other.’ And Ruth is significant. He is fond of her. But it’s much like an empty outline; a memory of the substance that once pressed out from within, threatening to burst him. Jennifer.

God he had a passion for her! She was a captive audience. They worked together one-on-one overnight. But in those eighteen months of overnighters it was he who was captured. She was the most endearing person that he’d ever known. Everything that she did tugged at his heartstrings, pulling him deeper and deeper, until it seemed every thought and feeling was submerged in her. Where was she now..?

He knew her when he was still trying to become a writer. That is, when he actually entertained the now seemingly naïve notion that he could actually make a living on his ideas, thoughts and words. He wrote a whole book of poems as an outlet for the ecstatic anguish that his unrequited love for her unearthed in him, deep in the bottomless recesses of his tortured being. She conquered him completely, and he knew that would never happen again. Never would anyone make it all the way into his fortress such that they stood inside the hearth. All else were as mere barbarians at the gate. Even Ruth.

‘God, I’d give anything just to sit with her for one more night,’ he thinks, getting up from the table, feeling heavier than ever, to wash out the French press.

“Don’t forget to visit Daddy on the way home,” Ruth reminds him with a quick peck on the lips as he trudges out the door. Ruth’s father, Donald, is their financial advisor. She wants Alex to ask him about a retirement plan that she read about on some website the night before. There’s always a new angle, it seems, and heaven help those that don’t see them. “We can’t afford to pour money down the drain,” she adds.

But Alex never makes it to see Donald. He doesn’t even make it to work to try to sell his quota of overpriced insurance policies for the day. Instead, heart wrenching, he thinks of a line that he wrote in his journal the night before, while feeling particularly forlorn, just before uneasily slipping towards sleep: ‘Those whose dreams are dead already have one foot in the grave.’

Alex is the walking dead, his heart as heavy and frozen as the Great Lakes not far from their cookie-cutter suburbanized life outside Minneapolis. In his wandering mind he sometimes simmers his heart, and it briefly thaws with the romanticism of his dying dreams of exploration, passion, adventure, and his slowly decaying half-hopes of becoming a real, legitimate, well-read writer traveling from city to city, country to country, bookstore to bookstore, reading from his latest firmament-cracking creative genius! The grandiosity! The absolutely necessary, insanity-saving self-deception of the idea! Another person. The person that his heart tells him that he is! The heart that never heeds his wife, his boss, his horribly depressing existence fixed as but another cog within the productive, wealth-waxing western machine.

Seeing the sign at the last moment, he almost skids off the road. Screeching off the interstate, he elicits an indignant series of honks from the truck following too close behind him.

“To Flip Pond,” the blue sign says. Seeing it, he’d suddenly remembered the last time that he’d allowed himself the luxury of visiting a bookstore. He’d had his face stuffed deep in the seam of some tome of a book, sucking up the scent of printed pages, a scent that he’d always loved, and associated with the smell of knowledge itself, when he’d overhead a group of older women at a nearby table. They were discussing the pond.

“Legend has it that the pond has the power to change people, and the world with it, without the rest of us even knowing that the change has happened.”

“What do you mean?,” another of the women asked.

“Well… first of all, it’s a very strange pond. We all know how cold it usually is here, and that most of the smaller bodies of water can stay frozen up to nine months of the year. But apparently this pond is always frozen. And if you happen to see any portion of it unfreeze, you should jump in immediately, because it’ll entirely change your life. You’ll go from who you are to who you’ve always wanted to be. It’ll flip you, and the whole world, and your entire life with it, from who you are, to who you should be.”

‘I wonder if it works if I hammer my way through the ice,’ Alex thinks to himself as he winds his way through the woods, approaching the pond. Surrounding Flip Pond stands the still stately birch forest, quietly resistant to the encroachments and extractions by which humanity once sought to remake it, and which it obstinately reinstated over and over again.

Alex parks and approaches, reading the sign:

“Flip Pond. Fall through to the true you. Tales tell of men reborn here. Lovers lost, embraced once more. Dreams rekindled, and finally set ablaze. This pond has traded hands many times, but none could bring themselves to fill it in, or to alter the surrounding terrain. The last owner, George Burn, gifted the pond to the county, saying: ‘I finally am who I always knew I was. It’s a gift that can belong to no one man. And so, let the brave men and women come when beckoned, and know themselves for the first time.’”

Leaving the sign behind, Alex moves down the steep embankment towards the water. The wind heaves the wall of protecting wood side to side, and in its brief intervals he glimpses the pond. It’s a partially cloudy day, the late August air forgetting that it’s meant to be summer, so enveloping him in its frigidity that his joints and bones beckon him to return to his Subaru. ‘Never,’ he thinks. ‘I’ll drown myself if I have to, for even a chance to pluck some string of truth from this legend.’

Standing at the edge of the pond, he surveys it. It’s small, not the least bit imposing. It’s rather inviting, actually, despite the fact that it’s frozen over, and that the chill in the air mirrors the ice that locks the secret within. There’s something about its shape; its perfect symmetry. It’s a perfect oval, as if drawn with a compass by some knowing oracle or deity.

His first foot upon the ice is ginger, as if he’s fearful that it’ll crack then and there, putting both feet in the grave, killing him while mocking his foolish entertainment of the absurd fantasy. Then both feet are upon it, and he finds himself running, and laughing, and playing. The child in his heart leaps forth, and all is a game; an entertainment. Running, giggling, jolting about, he suddenly imagines himself to be a figure skater. He sprints and glides, and with a great leap, imagining his seven-hundred-and-twenty-degree spin in the air, he loses his footing and his feet are flown out in front of him. Flying through the air, his back and neck about to meet the unforgiving ice, he just has time to think ‘serves you right, you fool.’

Then he’s awash. There’s no ice, just refreshing, welcoming water enwrapping him in newness. Then a flash pervades his mind. He’s now two people. He remembers both, but embodies and wishes only to be the one. The one he now is, and was always meant to be. He remembers his book signings, his trips around the world, his long afternoons of extended coffee drinking and reading and writing beside the lake where he lives. With Jennifer. He remembers their wedding. The love… God the love, as deep as the Mariana Trench.

He stands and stumbles, soaking, gasping, laughing, the paragon of love and longing for life, wading towards the shore. At the edge he turns around. Nothing but ice. Yet he’s completely soaked. In the breezily parting trees he sees his bright orange Subaru parked above, the color he’d really wanted.

‘Jennifer is an hour from here,’ he thinks with overwhelming joy. ‘She deserves an early lunch.’