The Drop-Off

By the time you are able to read and understand this composition, you likely will already know that the memories of families run shallow, the knowledge of history drops deep, and the scope of prehistory follows down to an abyss. Our sense of the time before us reminds me of the lake I have loved since before you were born, with its tiny fringe of rocky, shallow shelf, then the drop-off that you can swim over and stare down into, seeing how the underwater cliff crumbles down and away, then the real deep, the darkness that you can plumb, measure, and knowledgeably fathom but can’t begin to see through, can’t ever swim down to visit. I was fourteen when I first appreciated this.
 
I never felt starved for knowledge of my family. My mother and father told me plenty of stories about their childhoods and other family members. I knew three of my grandparents and many uncles and aunts. One afternoon at my paternal grandparents’ house, home from school for the holidays, I was talking to my grandfather’s brother, my great-uncle Jerry. He was telling me about his fascination with family history and his hobby of genealogy. He’d even taken a special trip to England once to try to find records that would connect William Jeffreys, his immigrant great-grandfather, more precisely to a longer lineage that he hoped would include a few nobles or at least a scandalous and historical Jeffreys or two.
 

I caught the bug, and with the benefit of a copy of Uncle Jerry’s family tree, some branches extending to nearly a dozen generations, I started constructing a tree of my own. I scored two early, easy coups to add to his work. On my mother’s side, a much-older cousin was also an amateur genealogist and could provide me with a handsome graft of several branches, again ten or twelve generations in extent. And poring through the stacks of a local library one day, I found a decades-old, published history of my paternal grandmother’s mother’s family, the Ryersons, who had been among the first Dutch settlers in what had long since become New York and New Jersey. That allowed me to tie the items my grandmother knew of her maternal ancestry directly into a larger story that included the first Dutch child born in America and stretched back to French Huguenots and Amsterdam burghers of the late sixteenth century.
 
With those three handsome, sprawling grafts spread out on my chart, all carefully hand-ruled and written as clearly as I could manage in my schoolboy print, I already had a bosky fan with several thick and leafy limbs reaching two to three centuries in places, decked at the tips with curious surnames I’d never heard before, like Trico and Gildersleeve. But now I needed to do some more original sleuthing, so I began, optimistically, by quizzing any living relatives in reach of me, either in person or by correspondence to last-known addresses my mother supplied me. The results were initially exciting but soon disappointing. I got no further than four or five generations, relying on the fly-leafs of old family bibles and living memory. Even at that, many of the links were uncertain, the dates of birth, death, and marriages often unknown or blurry.
 
Back at boarding school, I was taking Mr. Edwards’ required class in world history. On an evening when I was doing a bit of homework with my heavy textbook open to the Roman Republic, one of my dorm-mates  from down the hall popped in to my room with a piece of mail for me that had been mistakenly put in his box. It was from an elderly aunt on my mother’s side in northern New England, responding to a query of mine. In spidery Palmer script she wrote that one of the more unusual names on my cousin's tree, Sariph Secoida, my grandmother’s great-grandmother and therefore not very far removed but mysterious, had been a Senecan who had married into our otherwise mostly English-descended family. But she told me nothing of note about her, writing only that she faintly recalled her great-grandaunt as a quiet, old woman and “dark.”
 
I looked up from the lavender-scented letter and over at my open history textbook. For a moment, my head swam. Here I was scraping the surface of a few mute, nearly anonymous generations, trying to reconstruct a family history, and yet my head easily contained detailed information about those more famous humans going back for millenniums. I was dizzied both by the insignificance of my family to greater history and by the epochal, logarithmic difference in time scales between what I knew of general history and what I could learn of my family’s past. If I set the bare documentation aside and relied on family stories alone, we had, what, four generations of fuzzy dates and anecdotes to relay, five at the most? We were reasonably long-lived people, but go just a century or so deep, and the hand-me-down accounts abruptly ceased. If history was a ruin, our collective memory was only a garden compost heap already half gone to seed.
 
I never much expanded my genealogy chart after that, but for decades I carted it around with my belongings, more and more rarely unfolding its increasingly delicate creases. Somewhere along the line, probably a couple of years before you were born, I misplaced or lost it. The family members I interviewed for it are themselves all gone. 

These days, the world swarms with professional online services, genealogical and genetic combined, that I could pay to illuminate more of the shadowy recesses of our family tree. One of these days, I need to do that for you. At the moment, all the deep history I can tell you is that my Y-chromosome is from the most common male lineage in Western Europe, while my mtDNA haplotype appears to be Native American. You have, however, inherited neither of those.
 
But even if we do fill in our trees, you and I, and anchor them in the greater ruin of human history, the point still holds. These bits and bobs of memory that I’ve composed for you to read here, the scraps and anecdotes that my now-gone family members passed on to me, are tiny things. At the end of last summer, on our last day at the lake in early September, you wanted to try something daring on our final swim. You were six and you’d been practicing for months, dog-paddling and occasionally attempting a backstroke or freestyle, but you’d stuck to swimming in the shallows, horizontally along the shore. You’d never gone beyond where you could clearly see the bottom, not without wearing a life-jacket while I held onto you. You were often alarmed by the shadows of sunken logs and branches, the green-furred remnants of fallen trees.
 
“Papa,” you said, on the last day. “I'm ready to swim over the drop-off. I want you to swim close to me, but DON’T hold me, ok?”
 
So that’s what we did. It’s a startlingly short swim, if you strike out straight into that clear lake, to where the edge of the cliff appears underneath you and you feel a bit like you’re flying, as you float suspended over the rocks that tumble into darkness. You were afraid of trees and monsters in the lake’s depths, of ghosts from sunken ships, but you swam out anyway. For a few moments we paddled in place together, looking down, and I could feel the thrill and the fear of it for you, as well as my own thrill at your daring and my own fear I might have to rescue you. It was an empty afternoon at the woods’ edge, and  there wasn’t another soul around but us.
 
“Ok, Papa,” you said, popping your head back up, “That’s enough. Let’s swim back.” So we did. You were pleased with yourself, and I was proud of you. We were ready, then, to leave for the season. There’s no appreciating the warm, familiar shallows that you wade and play in until you’ve seen for yourself that cliff, until you've felt yourself small and suspended over the deep.