Consider them both,
the sea and the land;
and do you not find a strange analogy
to something in yourself?
– Herman Melville, Moby-Dick
Chapter One
A $100-MILLION city project, and it’s mine! All mine!!
I now realize it has become a habit, walking along this newly constructed riverwalk. It has been years in the making and I’ve come to think it was built just for me. Some nights, from my office to the train, through this third largest city in the nation, I realize I have only passed six people along the newly opened way.
It is simply wonderful.
So, can I be blamed for becoming intensely jealous for my walk? Where did these joggers come from? Why are they using my walkway? And these bicyclists, they’re even worse, faster and with even more heedless and needless mechanism.
Yet, in spite of these interlopers, the way is still enjoyable; it still allows my mind to wander. As this river flows to far-off places, my mind flows with it. Sometimes clear and sometimes clogged with trash—the river and my mind.
I am intrigued by the varied architecture of this new urban water feature, although there are portions where it’s quite apparent that the architect had never lived anywhere near a river. The jagged, artful ins and outs of the newly designed water’s edge have quickly filled with the floating detritus that rides any river, even more in one that flows through a major metropolitan area. Someone had noticed apparently, as the city engineers have recently installed bright-yellow floating bumpers—usually meant for oil spills—to corral and fend off the floating debris. An efficient yet truly ugly solution.
Along one artful stretch between the city’s many bridges I wonder at the odd inclusion of architectural steps down to the river’s edge. Like an old Sunday School painting of the ancient pool of Siloam, the steps enter gracefully into the water. disappearing quickly into its murky depths. Though, in this case, in the absence of an ancient Palestinian sun, the verge is slimed in green and littered with cigarette butts.
* * *
This is the segment I currently walk. Today is like any other. The weather has chilled slightly as October wanes. I’m on my usual route, enjoying the soothing solitude after only a half-day at my desk, heading for the train and the suburbs for an afternoon appointment.
The riverside eateries and drinkeries have closed for the season and the crowds are even lighter than usual. It’s like some post-apocalyptic setting without the damage. No rising smoke. No corpses in the streets. No burned-out vehicles and wandering dogs. Just peace and quiet. I could enjoy an apocalypse like this.
Then, like a long-foretold convergence of stars and planets, there appears a cluster of tourists, camera-phones pointing skyward at buildings so familiar to me yet totally amazing to them. Then two yoga-pants joggers breezing by in tune with their earbuds. And, to finish the deadly conjunction, the Lycra-laced rider on his thousand-dollar wheels appears. Like clockwork, they all round the corner with deadly symmetry and I—the lesser of four evils—tumble headlong down those strangely worthless steps toward the avocado-skinned water below.
* * *
No splash. No gasping for air. I just float there in silent suspension. My first thought: the light has changed. And the sound. Both are dimmer, yet brighter. Muffled, yet clearer.
There are faint burbling sounds of surprised voices overhead. I see cellphones pointed towards me but it all seems like some French painting, dappled and pointilliar. Then a flash from above, from one of those phones but, between me and the flash, a large stick photobombs the picture in midair. But it isn’t in the air. Then more strange mixtures of objects float above me. A coffee cup, a slab of construction foam, some fallen leaves, a broken length of two-by-four, more cigarette butts. Drifting in silent constellations above my head. No great alarm in my mind. Just part of the scenery.
I look down and see a rippled riverbed of Dijon-mustard silt. It is moving slowly beneath me, yet, when I turn my head to scan the other direction, I notice now the bottom is moving beneath me in the opposite direction. I am moving as if propelled by thought alone. Like some Segway rider, leaning, moving in any direction I wish to go.
I near the abutment of the bridge I had just passed under on the walkway above and notice massive electrical cables sprouting as ancient roots from the crumbling, old-growth concrete of the bridge house. The steel strands plunge beneath the mud and proceed across my path to the other side of the river. Before I know it, the cable crossing is yards behind and I turn again upstream—or is it downstream? I cannot discern the flow, only the vagaries of my own movements.
The sluggish flow means no more to me than it did to those mighty engineers of old, trying to save their city from the contagion that was its own waste, reversing the ancient waters to suit them and their fellow tribesmen, the modern inhabitants of the land of the stink-onions.
* * *
The first thing that gives me the slightest start is the sudden appearance of a shape, a figure of antique gold floating towards me through the murk. About the size of some sadly flattened football, its outline indicating it would pass me sideways if it continues on its present path. As it nears, an amber and brown grid with protrusions like handles above and below are all I can see. Then the oblong shape veers toward me and approaches, becoming more vertical but larger with each moment. Before I can react, a gaping hole in the form opens and closes, lazily, and the geometrically patterned flesh sweeps past my face and disappears over my shoulder. ‘Cyprinus carpio’ springs unbidden from deep memory, though I am no student of Latin. The strange words fade from mind, as the receding shape fades behind.
My ears begin to faintly hum, then slowly vibrate, then deafeningly pulsate as a blackening shadow looms overhead. Suddenly, what had naturally been ‘up’ seems tilted painfully to one side, then the other. My equilibrium is completely disrupted for what seems hours as this lumbering leviathan crushes down on my new world. I know what is passing me this time is not an organic, well-meaning creature like friend Cyprinus, but a menacing, mechanical monster from another plane of existence—the plane I had just so unceremoniously vacated.
This time, my arms and legs do respond to my brain. Flailing, thrashing, then finally forming coordinated movements resembling strokes, my body slowly . . . then more quickly . . . pulling itself out of harm’s way. One thing I cannot avoid is the pounding, eardrum-breaking thrum from deep within the planar beast gliding blackborne overhead, ringed with rivets and rust, shouldering me and my new element rudely out of its way.
I have almost adapted my still newborn senses to the onslaught when a final torrential thrust envelopes me in frothy green-white of propeller flume, spinning me helplessly head over heels. Then it is done . . . and gone. Seasickness has, to this point, been strangely absent. But now my stomach swirls along with the new element surrounding me. I nearly give myself over to my doom when the turbulence finally subsides, the eddies unwinding in all directions.
I drift numbly, as my newly developed knowledge core files this moment away. An instinctual presumption tells me that it will not be my last such experience.
* * *
I continue on, half drifting, half driving my way between the watery walls of this city sluiceway. Shadows cast by the edifices of man darken my new watery wandering. Then, finally, there is light. More and more as I approach a widening world. Then, finally, hinged and scraping metal walls that separate river from sea swing into sight.
During this birth process, I am squeezed in among the steel, fiberglass and wooden vessels of man—some of pleasure, some of pain. Then, with one last thrust, I can breathe free—admittedly a strange word to use in my present state.
The angular shadows previously clouding the reflected surface above me diminish, and now are gone from sight. No more oddly pitched images of sun off slanting silvered surfaces. The light is now as free as the water.
* * *
The only objects now above me are the fat, feathered bottoms of Canadian geese and the restless rear-ends of herring gulls. I’m momentarily startled as one of those white-and-gray missiles swoops past my head, chasing a smelt into the depths. The water grows clearer and colder, more pure and unpopulated. The noise seems to recede as well. The murmurs of earthly chatter. The city is gone. Only the sea—that vast, inland sea—remains. Something in me hopes the transition is complete—and permanent.
But what will I do now? I am enjoying my visit immensely. But like a tourist, I know my cash will run out soon. I’ll have to convert to the currency of my newly adopted country. But where to make the exchange? It’s all so new to me. Who will be my tour guide? Is there a consulate nearby?
But just as my mind is anxiously winding up, a school of Emerald Shiners intersects my way, giggling in mass amusement as they pass. I decide to catch up with them, tiny though they are. Their size surprisingly doesn’t seem to matter to me now, especially considering that thousands of them swirl before me, all moving in perfect symmetry. I am as weightless as they, and they as me. I move when they move, forward, sideways, with some unknown yet persistent direction. Their planktonic food source is their main driver, of course. And, though my eyes are quickly developing a greater appreciation—or should I say disregard—of “large” and “small,” I could not yet focus to the protozoic and diatomic level. That will come with time.
This being my first contact with them, I don’t attempt to communicate. I simply gravitate along with them, like fans at the same big game or shoppers in the same bazaar. They don’t seem to pay me any mind, though I’m not offended by their lack of notice. I am the newcomer, after all.
Then—ffft—they’re gone. The falsetto vibrato fades. I am alone again. A slight swelling of loneliness bubbles up deep within me but fades when an unexpected twist of the current washes me gently sideways from my path, what path there is. The words ‘trackless deep’ flash through my thoughts, with a greater understanding now.
I do notice the light is dimming in the east—its silvery shafts becoming less distinct one from the other. At least that one-directional sense remains to my new consciousness. Along with the loss of light comes a loss of corporal energy. My internal clock slows. I know I must soon sleep. The water cools; my body cools. My actions and movement abate. I float, motionless, borne along only with the rhythmic undulations of the new cosmos now surrounding me, now permeating me. For the moment, I am at peace.
* * *
Overnight I drift in streams within streams. Though currents are minimal in these varied inland seas, they are still present—in summer months flowing up to half a mile an hour in places. And as life and light reinvigorate my limbs, I notice my piscine telekinesis is becoming stronger, more natural. I think of a place; I move toward it. Like balance on a bicycle. Like the ancient magnetism of stars and planets.
As my distance from shore has increased, the signs of humanity decrease. An occasional steel drum, shipwreck, even obsolete aircraft.
Remembering that, in recent great wars, these great inland waters served as training grounds—or ‘waters’—for our young sailors and mighty ships. Flights were flown, bombs were dropped, landings were made. And unheralded numbers were lost. Too many men. Too many more planes. Now buried in silty graves.
At the sighting of one such plane my old curiosity takes control and draws me downward—and inward. The gray, moldering form of the military-industrial husk beckons silently. Like some bear trap lying primed and ready upon the greyed bottom. My old, intrusive nature pulls me down. Yet no trigger sounds. Just the fluid whoosh of my new climate.
Then it starts. Eyes spot me. Faces appear at rounded windows with mouths agape. Screams of fear and pain. Then the voices. What are you doing here? Save yourself! Get out! Get out!! Others moan with ageless groans of loneliness. Are you here to rescue us? You’ve arrived just in time! Come in! Come in! Are there others with you?
Suddenly a school of black bullhead burst through an opening and rushed upward, like bubbles from a drain, and sucks me with them in their mass ascent away from the hulk, breaking the spell, spinning me back into sanity. I glance back downward fleetingly, like Lot’s wife, like Odysseus’ crewmates, then rise, a bubble within bubbles, once again. My new fellow citizenry bear me, cradle me once again in their normalcy. Then, their unintended task complete, they proceed on their way, and me on mine.
One of the old black cats hangs back, however, and seems to be waiting for me to catch up. I slowly propel myself forward, like some clumsy seahorse.
“You do know you should never go down there,” he said, grandfatherly whiskers twitching as bony jaws pump open and closed. “They may be your kind but you’d never do them any good and they’d never do you any either. They’re beyond help now, you know. And maybe you’re not, . . . yet . . .” His last words barely audible as he fades back into the bluey murk to join his fellows.
I float, bewildered, glancing around, embarrassed. The blissful warmth that had been circulating through my whole being just moments ago is suddenly chilled away. Like ice-water drunk too fast on a summer’s day.
I glance downward at the darkened hulk receding below me. The voices are silent now—from this distance, that is. But I know they are still there. Helpless. Hopeless.
* * *
I drift ever northward. The waters become colder as I go. The sun more shallow; the surface wind-blown, unable to hold what little radiant warmth it receives. The colors morph from green-blue to ice-gray. Angrier. Or is that my own perspective? Some heartless anthropomorphizing, painting human emotion on a place where humans are really not that important. Where humans are simply beings passing in their noisome steel and iron tubs, playing their endless games, moving their vaunted cargoes, harvesting their ever-dwindling catch.
Day and night, the currents drag me northeast. The passes between these great inland expanses seem to connect. And at this strange convergence, where above man has bridged land masses with his great suspended threads of steel, below appears a transecting sign of men from another time. Men much longer dead than younger pilots and sea captains. Here are the tracks of furred land beasts and fur-clad hunters. Here are stones mysteriously aligned, arranged in deadly symmetry, meant by those higher minds to lead the lesser-minded creatures into gigantic herding, killing traps.
That ancient collision of hunger and instinct is now silenced by the sea. Yet still outlined in petroglyphic wonder. Man against beast from ages untold now covered in sand, slime, and snail.
As I look down on this great-lake stony henge, a ghostly school of lake sturgeons (Acipenser fulvescens)—their greenish-grey shapes, pointed snouts and pendulous barbels—appear from stage left. Silently they glide below me, emerging as out of legend. Sleek statues, time-encrusted and stately. Denizens of a world within a world they drift, sage-like priests and warriors.
Their bony scutes and denticles align like Navajo tapestry as they soar, undulating with the current. I almost fear to approach but sense they have already been aware of my presence. One of their number turns a bony eye socket upward then follows its gaze, climbing through the blurry layers to approach my paralyzed form.
He speaks. Again, my senses take in the communication, not knowing precisely the physics involved. Yet, according to definition, communication occurs—messenger, message, receiver.
“You have come.” I look around, wondering if he intends someone else. But, stupidly, knowing I am alone.
“What are these stones?” I mouth.
“You do not know?”
“How would I?”
He pauses, with patience that puts mine to shame. Fish brain turning. Time retreating,
“Your kind . . .” he begins. It amazes me the storied memories of these long-lived gray-scaled co-inhabitants. A thousand years may as well have been yesterday.
“Your kind put these stones in place. With years of planning and toiling, under the hot sun in the days of dry land, when this place was green and grassy. Your people—working together in their hunger—moving mighty stones as under a desert tyrant’s whip. Aligning their mighty weights to fool the hoofed and antlered ones on their endless, cyclic migrations from the northland.
My mind reels. In my entirely weakened and helpless state, how could I be seen as one of them? One of the ancients, the forebears? I suppose I should be, though. For turnabout is fair play, as ‘my kind’ says. After all, I had previously seen these scaly swimmers as one also, floating as one in their watery world. Out of sight, out of mind.
“I did not know.” I mouth numbly.
“No.” He makes tacit agreement. “Few of your kind have seen this place. Fewer still have surmised its meaning.”
The ensuing silence this time was uncomfortable, almost unseemly. Time and tide tear at us both. With questioning glances his fellows watch him, like some barely tolerated geriatric, habitually wandering from the group.
With little subtlety his fellows beckon. We move apart. No conclusion required or made. No farewell expected or spoken.
I am alone, again.
* * *
Day and night. Night and day. The diurnal clock still ticks deep within me, though admittedly stifled under tons of hydrostatic pressure. The movement is eastward, towards the rising of the sunglow. The circular concentration of light a thing of the past, now simply a rising, diaphanous curtain of illumination. Sometimes a passing school of my new countrymen temporarily dots the backstage draping, backlit in turquoise and gray.
Then, as in a bad dream, like some prisoner released, then recaptured, the sounds and smells—or rather, tastes—of humanity’s ways return. Yes, the waters tainted by human contributions, the olfactory senses blend and I realize what the finned ones in our midst have experienced since modern man encroached upon their waters. The cities of industry, of progress, line my route. Approaching, overwhelming, retreating. Mile after mile. Iron, steel, rubber, glass. All the tastes, laid out in a well-oiled buffet. Were I to die now, no autopsist could isolate the poison.
* * *
As I leave the expanse of mighty waters and venture into tributary and outflow, the banks around me expand and widen, then contract. Mudbanks and rockbanks, trees and cliffs. My finned fellows feast on krill and mayfly. The ever-balanced ebb and flow. Some are taken by hanging hooks. The young mostly—the hungry and the overeager. Some survive, returning with pierced jaws and smudged scales. Others . . . don’t.
But the great number of us continue. Under ugly or sinuous metal and stone spans of human travelers. Past crowded banks or oh-so-generously preserved green and leafy islets, the flow pulls me eastward. Through pools of cool and shady glades, over cliffs and rocks that jag and poke. My fellows, as rushing commuters, pay no notice of my bruised sides and battered head. I try to keep pace, though none care when and where I fall behind. There is no clock to punch, no schedule to keep.
* * *
Then I sense a pounding up ahead. This time different, not manmade. Through dark and green stretches an ominous sensation rattles my spine. With my newborn sympathy for my finny friends around me, I begin to wonder: Do they not see it, hear it, feel it? I cannot be superior in this regard. Though such a feeling had started to fade in my enjoyment of these wilderness waters over the many preceding miles, it is unmistakable now. The toll of doom approaches. If they cannot sense it, they should at least hear the pounding of my telltale heart. Stop. Stop! Proceed no further!
* * *
Now the agitation I feel begins to propel me back and forth across the current. Like some ship without rudder or compass. Like some bug cruelly dismembered by some nasty young boy, I spin helplessly and in mute pain.
Finally, a few of my finmates turn weary eyes in my direction. Through their flat expressionless orbs they manage to communicate their curiosity at my odd behavior. I mouth to them that they must cease their forward motion, that there is extreme danger lurking.
One of the older ones stops and, after motioning with lateral fin for the others to proceed, swims over with gracious manner to my side.
“Don’t you hear it?” I scream in sonic stress. “Can’t you tell something up ahead will mangle and murder you all?”
He continues to look at me in bewilderment. Then I see realization sweep over him. He understands, as a parent would with a child afraid of the dark. His large mouth opens and closes in relaxed fashion, in a way I have come to recognize as condescending kindness.
“My friend, it is nothing to fear.” He begins.
“But don’t you . . .”
“Peace, my child . . .” he continues. “It is only the cascade.”
“The cas—”
“We have been following the escarpment for many days. Named for your Niagagarega tribe, it spans many hundreds of your miles, though you citizens of the land are unaware. Now the forces of the world have directed it across our path, or rather, our accustomed element now flows across its path. We simply go with it.”
“You ‘go with it’? What do you mean?’
His mouth opens again. And closes, Slowly.
“We fall . . . with the falls.” He says, fatally and finally.
A moment passes between us. He knows I am still bewildered, and even rebellious, at the thought.
“You . . . go over the falls? But won’t you be killed? Or at least hurt badly?”
“That is the difference between us. We do not all seek comfort above all, as your kind does. Some of us hit the rocks below and become food for the birds in the pool beyond, but that is the way of our world. It is as it should be.”
“But I’m not of . . .”
Another moment passes. I can tell he knows my thoughts. I can also tell he has weighed them and found them wanting. To him, to his type, maybe to the world in general.
I wait.
“You know,” he begins, “It is really up to you. You may live. You may die. Again, it is really up to you.”
I drift on in this eddy of time. No rush. Time to think. Shimmers of others move past in the distance, unaware of me and my gracious counselor.
My shoulders finally relax. He senses my hard-fought acquiescence and moves parallel with me back into the current.
To this point, my journey has been one of involuntary drift. Now I feel that this is my true initiation, my moment of truth, my conscious choice. I’m swallowed into the whole, at one with the school. Flowing faster and faster towards . . .
* * *
The rumble becomes stronger; the light tingles and glints. We pass under a manmade span lined with my people. Other flashes of light from the ends of outstretched arms above. Me and my watery companions swim through metallic nets and cables, meant to hold back and protect my foolish land-fellows who venture forth on their flimsy watercraft towards these murderous waters.
Then we are alone. The final testing ground. The swirl and whirl of last wet bivouac before war. The battle lies just ahead. Ranks and battalions take their silent, unbidden places. Millennia of training bears its fruit. Cheek to cheek in frantic quiet we are aligned. Iron to magnet. The lot is cast.
Ahead lies line upon line of obstacles, each looking to be the last, only to reveal another. Our troops are phalanxed, then thrust apart by rock and rill, then regrouped. The cheers of water, the roar of inmixed air and foam, the battle-cry of fin and scale. Forward charges this light brigade toward the bubbling breech. My own consciousness now lost in the onrush.
Then . . . light, air, gasping. Floating, flying, flailing, falling.
* * *
Some fall straight, piercing the water of the receiving cauldron in perfect bullet-like fashion. They swim on, seemingly energized by the fall. Others, having twisted and writhed in the intervening air, land full on their sides, their air bladders deflated, sinking despite the slowly re-gathering current. And others, taken by the eddies of wind and mist, crash pitilessly on the surrounding and intermingled rocks. Silvery scales of no armoring effect, bones broken, entrails lost. These will feed the gathering gulls and other birds and beings of land and sea. These return their elements to the earth.
I fall among the fortunate. I finally revive and collect my wits. Though bringing up the rear, I rejoin the other stunned survivors and sail on.
As the schools of the fallen form and reform, gather their wounded, their young, the current slowly takes them under billowing gray masses above. The man-boats motoring against the current, fringed with arms outstretched and eyes amazed by clouds of mists and the arc of rainbows. None note the death and destruction that has taken place—repeating with each plummeting surge—just a few feet below them.
But man is not their enemy here, nor per se his ignorance. Here it has been simply geology. Nature’s ways set in stone. The hard world taking back the soft flesh that sprung from it.
* * *
Further on, I add warm-blooded counterparts to my list of traveling companions, for I am entering the land of the joyful and industrious beaver, otter, and muskrat. An otter is the first to break the social barrier—quadruped to biped—appearing at my side like some party-going glad-hander. Actually, I must control my self-satisfaction, for it is not me he’s befriending, but my swimming mates. And them, not as friends, but as food. He greets me heartily and swirls about me, nearly spinning in the earthy-scented bubbles he leaves in his wake.
Though I thought I knew much of these creatures from books and zoos, this personal interaction was so much more enlightening. So freely conversant with both water and air, so fully compliant with the ways of their water-soaked work, I cannot help but marvel and envy. And mourn at the loss of our joie-de-vivre. For their work of edgewater engineering, of muddy mechanics, with barely a fraction of it apparent to my kind, is truly stunning . . . and backbreaking even to contemplate. Yet, they go about it with such aplomb, such gleeful camaraderie amongst their kind, I cannot help but think this is some Edenic throwback. Is this reminiscent of Adam’s call, to subdue the earth and keep it? How far my two-footed fellow laborers have fallen, dragging ourselves so haughtily from one poorly finished endeavor to another.
Read Chapter Two . . .
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