My son, David seems at times like the steel watchspring in a cartoon which when wound too tight snaps and explodes its case. In just such a manner he explodes, unthinking, into action. This trait has more than once brought me close to grief in that excercise of the paternal office which I call not quite losing David.
My first call to excercise this office happened when David was two years old. Our family went on a camping trip to Silver Falls State Park, and there, while hiking to view one of a series of waterfalls, David pulled his hand out of mine. Flapping his arms like bird wings, exulting in his new found freedom, he ran off the trail down a short sloping shoulder toward a fifty foot drop to the foaming, rock-toothed creek below. Stunned, I chased him, not knowing if I could catch him, not knowing if I could stop. Beyond hope, at the edge, with one last desperate grab I caught his hand and pulled him back, not quite losing David.
Several years later our family went on a hike to Echo Lake which lies in a cirque to the east of Red Buttes. We followed the Horse Camp Trail as it switchbacks in steep snake-like coils beside the Butte Fork Slide and had a picnic and swim at the lake. In the late afternoon,legs rubbery from the climb, we were halfway down the trail when David, running ahead as always, turned a switchback and pulled back just as a rattlesnake on the trail's upper bank struck at him, barely missing his belly. We were a mile and a half from the trailhead and a long drive away from emergency medical care and again I experienced the gut-wrenching sensation that comes from not quite losing David.
More time passed and on a bright summer afternoon David and some friends were playing in a treehouse. They had strung a rope between two trees above the treehouse's roof and David, of course, was the one to summon up the reckless courage to slide across the rope like ninjas do in the movies. The rope broke. David fell twenty five feet landing in just such a way that one arm absorbed the brunt of the force of the fall. His friends walked him home, and when I saw his wrist bent into the sinuous s-curve of a Colles' fracture and thought about a head first landing I knew, again, what it was like to be not quite losing David.
What else could I say about other times... "David...You really don't want to meet underground anything that can dig a hole that size under the rootwad of a tree." (after he dove unthinking down a hole under a redwood) or "David...You really don't want to chase a bear cub uphill when it's bawling for its mother" (he had suprised the cub drinking at our swimming hole on Elk Creek) or "David...Doesn't it seem a little odd to spend your own money to suck death by installment into your lungs." (You know)
Human fatherhood is at best an awkward, jerkstep dance; and I, in my stumbling, bumblefooted way, reel on, relying on the underlying Father's hand, invisible, yet real for not quite losing David.
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