Don’T Drink the Water: A Citizen’S Story

Contents

Introduction

Don’t Drink The Water

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Acknowledgments

For Jack, Lucy, Gage, Emma, Tom

and

Eliza

INTRODUCTION

I’m a ghostwriter. This line of work brings me into contact with every sort of person imaginable. I’ve written the confessionals of celebrities brought low by addiction or personal scandal; I’ve written the tales of underdogs who rose to success against the odds of poverty, disability, or broken homes; I’ve spun fictional yarns about dragons and ninjas for celebrated authors whose publishers demand too much output for any one person to create.

But nothing in my experience could have prepared me for Bob McCormick.

I first met Bob at his apartment overlooking the Potomac River in Washington, DC. As he opened the door, I—dressed in my new client best and wearing my most serious writerly face—extended my hand to greet him. He smiled gently, opened his arms, and gave me a hug.

I knew instantly we would work well together. What I did not yet know was that our work together would change my heart and mind, forever opening my eyes to a new way of living in this world.

On our first meeting, Bob took me to the roof of his high-rise apartment building to look out over the city of Washington that we both call home. He pointed out the Washington Monument, the majestic dome of the Capital building, the Jefferson and Lincoln memorials, and the exalted spires of the National Cathedral that he himself had helped build as a tower crane operator decades ago. He told me that this city represents a country he cherishes and that he hoped to write a book that would express that love—and further it.

What I want you to understand about the book I want to write, Bob told me, is that I am not a politician, a revolutionary, or a religious zealot; I have no ax to grind; there’s no one I’m looking to blame or to take down; and I am not chasing fame or wealth.

To be honest, I was taken aback. If this was true—why hire a ghostwriter? In all my previous professional experience, I had worked with clients who chose to make their stories public because they had agendas. They were by no means bad people; in fact, their stories were often moving, inspirational testaments to what is possible when strong wills and hard work come together. But they were also in it for the renown. Books are public relations tools. People publish them to advance their personal brands. The author knows it; the agent knows it; the publisher knows it … and the ghostwriter knows it.

So, frankly, Bob was a client I couldn’t at first recognize. He freely admitted to being an average man without any special credentials that he wanted to publicize to the world. He is a simple, sometimes sweet man who loves nothing more than sharing a front porch with neighbors on a warm summer evening. Before an old knee injury caught up with him in middle age, he played countless pickup football games on the National Mall. He raised two children, always willing to push them and their friends on a swing he hung himself from a black walnut tree in the family’s backyard. And he wanted to write a book about the lessons he had gleaned from a life simply—but mindfully—lived. His agenda was not to achieve celebrity or even garner notice for the nonprofit organization he had founded. No.

Instead, as he told me, his purpose in writing this book was to speak as an average American citizen to other average American citizens. His life had shown him that there is much left to be discovered about being American, and still more importantly, about being human. He wanted to share his story in the hopes that something in who he is resonates with something in who we all are.

I met with Bob weekly for the better part of a year. He told me his whole story—the joy, the pain, the regret, and the shame—without shrinking back. For the first few days, I sat down with him thinking this would be a typical ghosting assignment. I would hear an interesting story of human perseverance; I would tell it on paper as best I could; Bob and I would pass it back and forth, editing until we were both satisfied; and we would shake hands and say good-bye.

But within days, I knew I had stumbled on something entirely different, something I could not have foreseen, and something I am eternally grateful to have been part of. In living his life not only with humility but with constant awareness, Bob has learned an essential truth about who we are as human beings. He has developed a perspective that seems so obvious to me now, but that is so easily masked by the day-to-day tasks of going to and from work, buying our afternoon lattes, changing diapers, and loading dishwashers. I do not mean to diminish these everyday tasks. We need them, and they are valuable.

But in the course of working with Bob, he opened my eyes to a broader perspective on this life and on this world. He opened my heart to a new view of humanity—one that is both filled with hope and challenge. One that calls upon us to take responsibility for the world we’ve inherited and to live with both dogged conscientiousness and boundless freedom.

I was amazed at the real, permanent shift the story of Don’t Drink the Water created in me, and I am honored to share it with you now in the hopes that it will do the same for you.

Teresa Spencer

DON’T DRINK THE WATER

CHAPTER ONE

All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed.

Second, it is violently opposed.

Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.

—Arthur Schopenhauer

I could still hear the sound of the tires on the gravel as Paul’s pickup retreated down the drive. He was long gone; it had been minutes since his old Ford rounded the last visible bend and disappeared behind the trees, but I strained to listen until every last evidence of his visit faded. I could feel a hovering emptiness, shapeless and dark, waiting to move into the space Paul was leaving behind. I fought to stay with the sound. Was that the final crunch of gravel as he turned off the driveway? If I could have stopped the soft rush of blood in my ears, would I have heard his transmission kick in, would I know when he was accelerating onto the county road, winding through the woods and out toward the interstate, disappearing?

And then, suddenly, the sound was gone. I wasn’t even aware of its last breath. One moment I was leaning forward, hands gripping the porch rail, straining to hear. And the next—I was surrounded on all sides by silence, bone deep and still as stone. It was the heart of February; the leaves were down, and there wasn’t so much as a rustling in the sharp, chill air. I was waiting for it; I knew it would come, but when it finally arrived, the silence was so sudden and harsh, so complete, that I felt caught off guard. As if provoked, as if blindsided after the whistle had blown.

Paul had shown up at my door two days before in the way only a brother in spirit can. We grew up together, comrades on that precarious path from boyhood to manhood. We went to the same college as classmates and teammates, and we worked our first jobs together, whiling away long stockroom hours volleying crumpled paper cups back and forth between us. I was best man at both of his weddings; he was best man at both of mine. And when life gave to one and took from the other, we shared what we had.

So when I found myself alone in a cabin in the woods, with nothing recognizable left of my former life and choking on the solitude I myself had created, it was Paul I called. I could hear, tapping at the door, the pain I’d tried to run from. Like a small army of shadowy creatures scratching at the edges of my consciousness, it insisted on gaining entry. When I understood that it was only a matter of time before the army beat down the door and surged around me, I turned to Paul to stand with me, shoulders thrown against the jamb, holding it at bay just a few days more.

Paul never left upstate New York and lives there still. But when I called him from my cabin in the deep woods of Virginia hundreds of miles away, it was only a matter of hours before he showed up on my front porch. He stayed the weekend. There wasn’t much to say. I was past the point of being able to give voice to a sadness I couldn’t even understand myself, and with a friend like Paul, there was no need to. We sat on the front porch in the cold, letting a few words drift quietly back and forth between us. He couldn’t save me from the wreckage of a battle I’d been waging in my own head for years. But with him there, I had one thin but sure thread to cling to, and it was possible to breathe in and out for those two days.

Life took over. At the end of the weekend, he had to get back to work. As I stood on the porch, watching him climb into his pickup and start the ignition, I could hear the army of shapeless creatures gathering at the door again, their nails scraping softly, persistently. I could imagine their long fingers closing around my lungs. I knew that the moment Paul was gone, I’d be left to hold the door closed against them on my own, and I didn’t have the strength. Or the will.

I stood there listening hard enough to turn my ears inside out, cursing the years of construction work that had dulled my hearing. I listened as the last thread connecting me to the living ground steadily away through the gravel and faded to silence. And then I was alone. The moment the silence struck me, and the creatures burst in.

In the sudden vacuum left by Paul’s retreating wheels, I sucked the winter air in sharply through my teeth, felt it swell and roil in my lungs and then push back out of my throat in one soundless sob. With the next breath, my whole body was shaking. I gasped, trying to breathe as quickly as the sobs escaped, my chest thick with their pressure. I instinctively doubled over, wanting somehow to suppress the force crashing over me. I’d been here countless times before, consumed by uncontrollable tears, and always they would run their course and leave me spent but relieved. This time, though, I sensed something was different. I could imagine no end to this jag; I recognized it as something beyond me.

Time retreated to the outermost edges of my consciousness. I wandered through the cabin, unable to see through the tears. It was all I could do to inhale between heaving sobs more like retches than breath. I was vaguely aware of sitting on the edge of a kitchen chair, my forehead in my hand. Then I was on the floor. Then on the bed, teetering close to the edge, my face in the pillow. I stood, and I paced. I furiously turned around in the cabin, half-trying to outrun the tears. I knew it was useless. I paced anyway.

I didn’t notice the lengthening of the shadows until night had fallen. I realized with a start that I was in blackness too complete for me to move about. I found a wall and sank against it. I had known for months that it was a mistake to come to this place. What once seemed like a charming retreat, an escape from the persistent army that had been at my heels for years, was now a prison. I had longed for solitude, time to think, a reconnecting with simplicity, nature, what is fundamental.

When I first stumbled on to the cabin while out for an aimless country drive, I called the broker on impulse. He told me that part of the movie Clear and Present Danger had been filmed in the cabin, and somehow that didn’t strike me as being at odds with my vision of woodland calm. I moved in three days later.

It was only then that I remembered the brutal murder scene shot where my couch now stood. And it was only then that I noticed the way the cabin’s roof hung over the windows, blocking the sunlight. But I’d already hung heavy, forest-green curtains over them and a dull, darkly woven tapestry above the fireplace. I didn’t notice the lack of sunlight until I’d exacerbated it, unconsciously shutting myself into a permanent night.

I cried in the darkness. Sometimes my whole body was wracked with painful heaving and my ears rang with the strange, choked sound of my own voice. And sometimes the crying was barely a trickle. I shook soundlessly on the cabin floor, my body locked in a fragile trembling. I knew from the totality of the darkness that it must be night, but my body didn’t react. I felt no hunger; I did not sleep.

Somewhere close to dawn, I found myself wandering out the front door and onto the porch. I didn’t know what, if anything, drew me out of the cabin. Maybe I was trying to escape, maybe I hoped the splitting cold and the open sky would give me some relief from the weight of the sobs. Or maybe I had entirely lost control and was giving over to purposeless steps. Somehow I realized I was standing outside, without a coat, in the semigray of early morning. I had cried through the night. The tears subsided momentarily, enough for me to see out over the porch rail and into the dense trees.

Looking out through the naked branches, I could see down to the stream that ran along the base of the hillside. It was a deep purple, almost black in the predawn light, but still I could see its subtle shimmering. The stream had held me hostage countless times that winter. With every rain, it overswelled its banks and flooded the drive, leaving me trapped in the accidental darkness of the cabin.

What a fool I was to come to this damned place, I thought yet again. There was no counting the times I’d had this thought since moving there. What a fool. What had I thought I’d find? Some kind of idyllic Walden? A reprieve from my mind, from the ever-lurking army of twisted, ugly creatures? Instead I’d only burrowed further into myself; I’d locked myself in.

And still I was crying. Through the cresting waves of pain that overwhelmed my consciousness again and again, a tiny, disconnected memory surfaced in my mind. An old friend … I couldn’t think of his name or see his face clearly. An old friend whom I used to head out to the woods with to camp. Sitting beside a fire with him, shooting the breeze, stirring the coals with sticks. I remembered him looking into the flames and murmuring, They say hypothermia’s not a bad way to go.

I didn’t know what triggered the memory; I wasn’t even sure it was real. But I clung to it. Not a bad way to go. Perhaps first my body would go numb. I imagined that would be painful—I knew the distinct ache of gloveless fingers on a bitter Buffalo morning. But after that initial pain? Perhaps there would be a quietness—a retreat. The real retreat I was looking for when I came here.

It would be pretty easy. In fact, I couldn’t think of a simpler way to go. No weapon to buy, no need for hard-to-find prescription pills. No testing the rafters, no tugging on the rope to try its strength. I could just stroll down to the stream in my underwear, have a seat, and wait. I wouldn’t have to watch