by Michael J. Tougias
Lyons Press, 2021
Anyone who has turned to nature as a balm to an emotional wound – or to seek inspiration for how to live – will likely find relatable content in Michael Tougias’ memoir, The Waters Between Us. Within its pages, Tougias shares the insights from his experiences as a hyper kid, a teenager plagued by less-than-stellar decision-making skills, and an adult who has felt his way through life, mostly successfully, in large part due to his connection to the natural world. Along the way, he faces family tragedy and an at times uncomfortable relationship with his son-of-Greek-immigrants father.
The author of more than 30 books, ranging from children’s titles and memoirs to survival tales and history tomes, Tougias describes himself in this new book as “a wild kid and a magnet for trouble,” a youngster who was “always scheming, planning, and daring my friends to try new things, most of which were semi-dangerous.”
Raised in Longmeadow, Massachusetts, and a graduate of Vermont’s Saint Michael’s College, Tougias has spent a large portion of his life outside. The tales in The Waters Between Us bring readers along on his adventures: with friends and his younger brother in a Connecticut River wetland known as “the Meadows” to the spot named “Pollywog Pond,” to family vacations on Lake Morey in Vermont, to college on the shores of Lake Champlain, and, ultimately, to the cabin in the mountains Tougias dreamed of since he was a small child.
“I once read that adventure is the result of ineptitude. I had lots of adventures,” Tougias writes in the Prologue. “It’s the trips that didn’t go as planned, the days when nature threw a curve – those are the days I remember best.... Through each misadventure there was a bit of valuable learning that I didn’t fully appreciate until adulthood.”
These adventures often resulted from long, unscheduled days outside, during a time and place when, as Tougias writes, “My parents simply expected us to return home for lunch, home for dinner, and in the evening to be home at dark. We really had almost unlimited freedom, and that...fostered a wonderful sense of creativity and self-reliance.”
It also led to both humorous (at least in retrospect) and dangerous situations, including the time a young Tougias decided to paddle an aluminum canoe the length of Lake Morey and had to be towed back to shore, an incident in which his friend was attacked by a swarm of hornets at their neighborhood fort, and the summer day he and a pal hitchhiked to Maine and got caught in a riptide.
Through it all, Tougias wished he could live in the woods instead of the suburbs. And he longed for an easier connection with his father, who ran the family’s bakery – working long hours six days a week, with only one week off to spend in Vermont each year – and who had little patience for the ongoing antics of his trouble-finding son. These two longings were twined together.
“The cabin concept, I later realized, was my pursuit of happiness, my quest for the simple pleasures,” Tougias writes, “and a desire to replicate these fleeting feelings of camaraderie I felt with my brother and father when we were outdoors.”
The author also credits his time outside as a saving grace to his personal well-being and academic goals: “That little Pollywog Pond, the fort, the Meadows, and other outdoor places helped keep me a bit grounded, connecting me to nature, which provided a welcome diversion to the peer pressure I felt at school.... I’m convinced that had I not kept one foot in the woods during those formative years, I would have stayed on the path of nonstop detention and never have gone on to college.”
A family tragedy during those college years revealed the strength of his parents and, eventually, led to a closer bond between Tougias and his father. It also fostered in him a sense of responsibility to use his education and to make his own way.
As he began a career in the insurance field, Tougias was also determined to find that cabin in the woods, a place he’d sketched as a boy – with a view of the mountains and water for fishing. He finds it one snowy Christmas Eve, in the woods of Vermont, a long, cold drive from his apartment in Boston.
Buying that cabin, with a loan from his parents, set off a new round of adventures for Tougias. And decades later, he writes, this simple structure in the woods provides the space to “shift into a lower gear” and to reflect on past adventures – and, maybe, those yet to come.