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 increases, 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 suck 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 drags 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 people 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 kind — 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 with 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 watery worlds. 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.
More to come…
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