At the Dock

We were at the airboat place in South Florida, in Everglades National Park. We were here to see alligators.

I had made the arrangements. Scoped the place out, bought the tickets. A gas-powered ride through the swamps offended my park ranger soul. I swallowed my pride and principles. This was not the moment for a lecture about what nature appreciation is supposed to mean.

It wasn’t a restaurant, not exactly. A concession stand. A counter, a few tables inside, more outside under a low overhang where the air moved a little. The kind of place where you don’t make a plan. You just drift into eating.

The airboats departed and returned just beyond the tables at the dock.

He was at the counter when I went over from the ticket will-call. He asked if I wanted anything. I said a Coke. He ordered, handed it to me, and I went outside to sit down.

It didn’t occur to me that anything needed to be said. We were together. That was the plan.

I sat at one of the outside tables. It was warm, but not unbearable. Boats started and stopped. People moved in and out, breathless tales of reptiles repeated as each boat arrived. Nothing unusual.

I waited. After a while I noticed that he wasn’t coming out.

Not immediately. Just the slow realization that enough time had passed that something was off.

I went back inside. He was sitting at a table, eating.

“I didn’t want to sit outside,” he said.

When I tried to explain why it bothered me, the conversation went somewhere else.

“No, but what are you really mad about?”

It’s a strange question when the answer has already been given.

I wasn’t mad about outside versus inside. I wasn’t mad he wanted to eat his hot dog somewhere else. I was sitting outside just after he had handed me a drink, assuming we were about to have lunch together.

He decided to eat inside. He did not come find me. He did not tell me. He did not look.

“You weren’t inside,” he said.

That was the explanation. Not said as an apology, but as a conclusion.

We had been together for sixteen years, long enough that certain things stop feeling like rules and start feeling like gravity. If you arrive together, you leave together. If you eat, you eat together. If one of you changes the plan, you tell the other one. Because it’s what the word together means.

I tried to explain it again. Not louder. More precisely. That it wasn’t about where he ate. It was that he didn’t think to come get me. That it didn’t occur to him that I would still be sitting outside.

He listened.

“But why didn’t you come inside?”

There is a moment, in certain conversations, where you realize that what you are describing does not exist for the other person as a concern.

Not that they disagree. That they do not recognize it as a thing at all.

So I went back outside.

The same table. The same heat. The same engines and voices at the dock.

I don’t remember deciding to sit down again. I just didn’t get back up.

After a while, someone asked if I was okay.

A ranger.

Not abrupt. Not suspicious. Just close enough to notice that I had been sitting there longer than people usually sit without moving.

I said yes.

He waited to see if the answer checked out. I could see he didn’t quite believe me.

I told him I was a ranger too. I told him I know families come to a park and have disagreements. I told him this was just a very quiet one. I told him only I knew we were having one.

He nodded.

“What’s it about?”

I told him.

“I have to ask,” he said. “Do you feel safe? Do you need any help?”

I told him I had just been sitting out in the sun for a while, probably a little too long. I told him what I really needed was another Coke. I told him I could probably manage that on my own.

He seemed to believe me. He watched all the same as I got up and went inside.

We had come to the park together. He was inside. I’m the one who got us here, made reservations, bought tickets. And I never even wanted to come. And I spent all this time next to the airboats I didn’t have any interest in, listening to people talk about reptiles I didn’t want to disturb in the swamps I didn’t want to visit. And a ranger, whose job it was to look out for strangers, had checked up on me.

I still have the park stamp from that day.

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