Writing

 What Does It Mean to Grow Up By the Water?

By Mark J. Terra-Salomão

As published in The Quinobequin Review

10 November 2023

My Avô (“grandpa” in Portuguese) came from a place with no rivers. He was born on Pico and lived the first half of his life on Faial, twin islands in the Azores archipelago separated by a five-mile-wide channel. Volcanically formed, neither island has rivers. They have hot springs and streams and lagoons and little brooks fed by rain and condensation that feed the meadows which in turn feed the black-and-white Flemish cows, but no rivers. 

Avô was 13 when his dad died from tuberculosis. To support his five sisters and their deeply depressed mother, he was sent away from them to live with an uncle who farmed him out as a manual laborer. My Avô lost his father and his childhood. Walking along the limestone seawalls of Horta, Faial’s only city, he vowed to escape across the sea. 

Avô grew up, married, and had children of his own, including my mother. In 1970, my family immigrated to the US and settled in Somerville. Avô worked in factories in Cambridge, coughing and spewing shadows of their former selves, remnants of the early industrialization powered by the Charles River. His wife, my grandmother, worked in Somerville Hospital’s cafeteria, serving lunch to surgeons who patched up workplace accidents. 

America was a dream. Avô gathered friends to start their own social club for Faialense people in Inman Square. Strolling along the banks of the Charles on his lunch breaks, he remembered pacing up and down the seawall in Horta, staring across thousands of miles of undulating sea. Sure, the river was grimy in those days, but it was a river: a wide decisive vein of perpetual motion. Here, he could understand that he’d made his dream come true. He’d escaped. 

Then, homesickness set in. Even on the rare occasions he could afford to pay for a long-distance call, Avô  couldn’t bring himself to speak with his mother on the phone. He felt disconnected  from his culture. Though surrounded by other Portuguese people, he felt they were all playacting at their own culture, being so far removed from its source. Avô struggled to find a job that satisfied his intellectual curiosity. He didn’t care about American consumerism, the “pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps” mentality. He could only see a store that sold everything except what he needed.

Now, when Avô looked out over the Charles River, he understood it as a liquid chain binding him to the iron ball of Faial. The Charles flows into the Atlantic Ocean, of course, and if you sail due east of Boston, the Azores are the first bits of land you’ll encounter. 

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I was born here, in Boston proper (is “Boston proper” an old Boston turn of phrase people don’t use anymore?) The banks of the Charles play a part in my earliest memories. Avô retired to care for me. A financial advisor had deemed it unadvisable. Every other month or so, he would take me on the Charles River boat cruise that still departs from Lechmere Canal Park in Cambridge. He could not afford the tickets, but bought them anyway. It was his way of making up for moments lost to disconnection (with his mother) and later, to alcoholism (with his own children). Now, he was sober, and my grandma chided him for spending what little he had on our boat trips.

When I was five, pancreatic cancer killed my grandfather. In my family we theorize about how he got cancer in the first place. My grandma insists it’s from whatever heavy metals made up the protective silver bodysuit he wore at the medical devices factory, dressed like he was prepared to sample lava from volcanoes. My mom thinks the bookbindery chemicals are to blame. I suppose it could have been the alcohol. Somehow, poison flowed within my Avô’s veins as it long flowed within the Charles.

His death changed my life. No matter how bright the sun shines when I walk along Memorial Drive, the river appears slick with grief. To this day I cannot watch the videotape of my parents’ wedding without sobbing. I hear Avô’s voice but don’t remember it.

When I was old enough to attend college, I left Boston for Pittsburgh. I tried substituting the Allegheny River  for the Charles. I forgot that coruja is how to say “owl” in Portuguese. I fell in love with a woman who couldn’t or wouldn’t love me back. I drank a lot, not knowing at the time I was replicating decades-old mistakes. 

Years later, when I came home, I settled by new waters. I began to walk at Walden Pond in the winter, where Thoreau and Emerson and Alcott had walked before me, and where my Avô and mom took me wading as a toddler. On one particular  walk, around the time I started dating my fiancée Amanda, Walden had partially frozen over, the ice sheet thick along the shore but thinning out to nothing at the center. When I stepped on the ice at the shore, the energy traveled towards the center, vibrating the ice like a harmonica’s reeds against the water beneath. I laughed and laughed. The universe has rarely sent me love songs as beautiful as that one. Amanda probably heard it. Maybe my Avô, too, wherever he is. 

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When I reflect on Avô’s death now, twenty-four years later, I know how water can function as an escape or a prison. My Avô managed to flee over the ocean, but the Charles River, once a beacon of freedom, kept pointing him back home across the Atlantic. He couldn’t outrun his childhood phantoms.

I was born by a flowing river in a centuries-old enclave of academia, but the sadness and fear that river evokes for me even on a sunny day can still bring me to tears. Just as it was for Avô, the river is a promise of a greater life and a symbolic prison, containing a grieving little boy who became a grieving man.

My own child is scheduled to arrive on this planet this spring, walking distance from Walden Pond. I know full well I cannot protect them from the currents of the past. But I can teach them that the Charles flows into the Atlantic, where their ancestors left verdant islands behind. I can teach them about this pond, about Thoreau and Emerson and Alcott and the ideas and modes of living they championed. I can hope this water will bring fresh starts and transcendental truths. I can hope their prison will be much smaller than mine, their escape much larger, and that they will help whoever comes after them traverse the waters of life even smoother.