Isle Chile

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The summer of Logan began when he came home from university in May. He had a successful school year, but the hockey team had a tough season. I saw him shed the load of school and sport the minute he walked through the door. Happy to be home and surrounded by everything mundane and familiar, he took two weeks to unwind, secure a summer job, set up his training program at the gym and the arena and brought the paddle boards down from the loft.

For five years, when the paddle boards descended, summer had officially begun. These boards were the evolution of the boogie boards that were shoved into my car every summer since my boys were five and seven years old. We live near five Provincial Park beaches and having grown up in Trinidad, it was no wonder it was important to me to maintain a connection to the water and make beach-going a part of my boys’ lives.

Whether it is one upon which warm, salty waves crash or crisp, cool, fresh-water ones lap onto the shore, there is something calming about the beach. I have always found it easy to think at the beach. It is the place where everything comes together and makes sense and It is the one place I truly relax and find peace.

In this summer of Logan, the weather was almost perfect. The air smelled cleaner; the sound of the water, the rustling of leaves in the wind and the shrieks of seagulls in flight were louder without being a burden on the senses. Just as in years gone by, I was drawn to the beach this summer. The shush of the waves, the wind in my face that swirled up into my hair, launching my grey curls into the air like kites, soothed me, put a smile on my face and I believe it continues to have a similar effect on my sons. For Adam, the beach is a place where his autism does not collide with the noise and sensory overload of everyday life and for Logan, it is the place where he is able to organize his thoughts and get in-tune with himself.

While navigating his way through life has been a daily challenge for Adam, growing up with an autistic brother wasn’t always easy for Logan.

I have always maintained that autism is a family diagnosis — one person in the family may have the signs and symptoms of the neurological condition but in order to be a family, everyone has to learn how to live with it’s challenges. Born second, but the older brother in many ways, Logan accepts and understands Adam in a way I always hoped he would but never demanded or expected of him. At twenty-two, he incorporates Adam into his life by creating Adam-friendly outings Adam can not only tolerate but look forward to and enjoy. There have been many bright and hopeful days surrounding Adam’s autism and there have been just as many dark and dampened ones, but Logan has never dwelled on the latter. Instead, he draws upon the good memories of the childhood he and Adam shared especially the ones of our days spent at the beach.

The summer of Logan is in essence my Summer of Logan as it is our fifth year of paddleboarding together, sometimes as early as eight-thirty in the morning. I picked up the activity when I was fifty-two and Logan was seventeen. Older and achier from nagging dance and sport injuries, standing on a board floating even in the stillest of water had been a constant challenge.

But I refused to give up. This wasn’t just a fad — an expensive something undertaking that I would eventually chalk up as too difficult to master and cast aside. I bought the board, and I was determined to master riding it.

Having Logan accompany me to the beach when he was a teenager was nice but with him being sure-footed and a natural on the water, I understood it was more fun for him to cross the lake without having to wait on his slow and unsteady mother. So, while he ventured across the lake, diving off the board, doing yoga handstands on it and radiating youth and vitality, I worked on maintaining my nerve and balance, paddling closer to the shore. Over time I made progress and could hold my own paddling beside my son along the shore but dropping to my knees when I joined him in a cross-lake paddle.

Now twenty-two, Logan has turned me into a damn good paddle boarder. I’m not sure if he had an agenda, but he took me from still-wobbly-mediocre-mom on a paddle board to mom-who-stands-on-the-board-like she-was-born-doing-it. Not only did I get onto the board without worrying about my balance this summer, but I also stopped thinking about trying to stay upright. And for the first time in five summers, I was able to stand up on my board, cross the lake with my son and enjoy the natural beauty around me. I wasn’t looking at the weeds below the water but to where swans were teaching their cygnets to fly. The irony of me getting to see birds teaching their young while my son taught me how to stabilize myself on a paddle board was not lost on me.

All their lives, I taught my boys how to do things. I taught them to read, write and to count; how to brush their teeth and tie their shoes. I taught them how to do their laundry, how to manage their money and how to cook. I was the one who led them to the waterfront on their bikes. I took them to the beach and taught them how to ride waves on a boogie board. Now, the tables have turned, and I find myself happy and excited to learn new things from my adult children.

Logan’s approach to instruction is quite Zen. He had far more patience than I would have had trying to teach someone like me to get it together on a paddle board. He calmly let me know that I already mastered balancing on the board and that all I had to do was get out of my head. I had to simply stand on the board, forget about balancing, soften my knees and relax my feet and just look ahead and take in the exquisite view, knowing that my body already knew what to do. I stopped hyper-focusing on balance, and started paddling with longer, faster strokes in order to keep up with my teacher as we crossed the lake. Then, came the tip that took me to the next level — my grip on the oar was wrong. I was working too hard. With a simple adjustment of my hands keeping them shoulder width apart on the oar and a subtly put an earworm of a mantra (bend and straighten, bend and straighten) into my brain to make my arms move much like the push rods on the wheels of a steam train.

The last stumbling block I faced was two-fold. Unlike my son, I do not possess a core of steel and was often betrayed by my wanting mid-section muscles. I could not maintain my balance with the puny wake of a jet-ski, let alone a speed boat and I would either drop to my knees on the board for fear of falling or would plunge into the weedy water and struggle for what seemed like an hour to get my sorry self back onto my board.

So, Logan fixed the issue. And he fixed it in a way that no one in my family has ever tried to do when it came to teaching me how to do things. I was used to my father, rolling his eyes, raising his voice, sucking his teeth and giving up on me. He wasn’t a patient teacher, yet somehow, I learned the basics of riding a bike, swimming and most sports from my father and perfected the skills over time on my own. When I fell into the weediest part of the lake, my son casually paddled back to where I was floundering and exhausted. In his most soothing and encouraging no-fuss voice, Logan talked me through the steps I needed to take to get myself back up and standing on the board. He was so confident in my ability to haul myself out of the deep water, that I started to get my second wind and was determined to free my legs from the icky caress of the weeds and resume paddling back to the beach with him.

In spite of the life jacket that felt like it doubled in size in that moment, I grabbed onto the centre handle with my right hand, steadied the board with my left and whipped my right leg onto the surface and hauled my body onto it. It wasn’t graceful nor was it pretty, but I did it and it was not until I was riding back home with him in the car that I realized he never jumped in the water to help me. He never tried to pull me back onto the board. He simply paddled close by and talked me through what had to be done.

In the days that followed, he instructed me less because I was getting better at this paddle boarding thing. Occasionally, when we paddled through wavier parts of the lake he would remind me to engage my core and relax my legs and put a little umph into my paddling so we could get past the wake from a passing boat. He was always looking out for me, and he complimented me on how far I’d come. I think he’s pretty proud of his momma’s progress this summer and that makes me happy.

The beach was my gift to them every year since we moved to the area seventeen years ago. It was where they could run wild, jump into the waves on windy days or run miles away from shore toward the horizon when the tide was low. At least twice a week, we’d buy fast food and snacks and have lunch on the beach, swim and build sandcastles until seven pm. The most beautiful photographs of my boys were all taken at the beach, and it wasn’t until I realized (even in adolescence) they never missed a chance to come with me to the beach, that I was sure they truly appreciated our time spent there. It was never boring, or too far away — it was, and still is that thing we do together.

This summer, Logan re-gifted the beach to me, and it has been the best present. Mastering paddle boarding allowed me to relax while drifting on the water enjoying the peace of nature with my beautiful boy. As the summer draws to an end and he heads back to school, he is leaving me with memories of a summer I will cherish forever. I am grateful for the conversations we had paddling side by side. I will smile at the jokes we shared and will re-tell the story of the crazy day when we became rescue rangers to the summer-campers stranded in the lake when their boat engine quit.

It will always be the summer I learned more than just paddle boarding from my kid. It was the summer I learned about the man he has become and the man he will evolve into as he pursues his dreams. I don’t know how many more summers he will grace us with his presence but that’s okay. His life will take him wherever he needs to go but I will always have the summer of Logan, held in my heart.