Author’s Note: I’ve always thought that daylight in the month of October in North America has a special, glorious quality which can’t be quantified. October is also a time of intense back-to-school activities; it reminds me of my arithmetic and calculus classes. Thus, I used the term “asymptote,” borrowed from my coaches, to describe an imperfect attempt at getting at the essence of October light: not quite there but tending to decipher its enduring splendour. 

Asymptote

October morning, the light seen
through the backhand of a silver moon—
anchoring us to the bottom of the night, 

through which the hours pass,
like prime numbers through Eratosthenes’ sieve,
mindful of our doubles and ghosts alike, 

—an algorithm
of lunacy and autumn winds
—stretched out on this day’s asymptote. 

Let it be said of October that there is no boundary
at its last outpost of fickle warmth—
a time to enjoy when the end is near,
freed from the poison of numbers, 

inside the veins of the last green leaves. 

And here we are, left behind,
in the race to follow an unseen summer—
our hearts muted at dawn. 

♦ 

Irina Moga lives and writes in East York, Ontario, Canada. Her latest book, a collection of poems, Variations sans palais, was published with Éditions L’Harmattan (2020). Her work has appeared in literary magazines including Canadian Literature, carte-blanche, PRISM International, Foreign Literary Journal, Poetry Quarterly, and elsewhere. Website: www.irinamoga.com

Delmarva Review publishes evocative poetry,  fiction, and nonfiction selected from thousands of new submissions during the year. Designed to encourage outstanding new writing from the region, the nation, and beyond, the literary journal is nonprofit and independent. Financial support comes from tax-deductible contributions and a grant from Talbot Arts with funds from the Maryland State Arts Council. Website: www.DelmarvaReview.org

Author’s Note: Still coming to terms with his failed marriage and estrangement from his son, a middle-aged man finds a small cave on a beach while staying nearby. Its secluded, shrine-like quality prompts him to give his memories to it as offerings. In doing so, he recalls his relationships not just with his ex-wife and son, but with his own dead father, through all three of which he traces haunting echoes of the sea.

In the Sea God’s Cave

I DIDN’T PLAN TO BE HERE: THIS PLACE, folded into its sliver of shore and stone between the sea and the untidy fields. I found it by mistake, when it was getting dark; I thought it was a shadow on the cliff face. I wanted to get back on the path.

It was the next day, when I returned, that I realized it was a hollow in the rock. I parted the ivy and the weeds hanging over it. My phone light showed an awkward shape, twisted and low, gouged out of the stone. Its sides glistened with water. I could smell damp and vegetation, and the brine breath of the sea. It was quiet, though, cut off from the restlessness of gulls and waves outside. I realized I could fit into its space if I wanted. Hide there, unseen. In this cave.

——

My wife told me once that I undermined our marriage by being secretive. Not dishonest, not lying, but closed. “Shut, like a shell,” she said, on the night she left me, fed up being married to a mollusk. I thought of T.S. Eliot’s “… pair of ragged claws, scuttling across the floors of silent seas” but said nothing, which I guess proves what she meant.

——

We spent much of our time together on beaches like this. I can see them, bathed in the sepia light my memories always arrive in, like antique postcards. The past for me is a venerable ivory, worn and reassuring and strong. It’s the present that I find brittle, a worry in my fumbling hands. My ragged claws.

——

I’ve always liked a beach out of season. The uncluttered, disingenuous space allowing its few occupants only a temporary pass. Each bird, each wave-wreck, each footfall, or speck of jetsam…all refugees, wandering their rootlessness among so much sky, so much expanse. The distance itself rinses you clean, washes your habits away in its huge, indifferent flow. And when you leave, it’s as if you’ve been allowed back into your own life, purified. Forgiven.
——

I think there’s more to this little cave than meets the eye. Maybe it’s one of those lucky places you read about in myths, the chosen spot of some god or sprite, numinous and magical. I should bring something to it, perhaps, make an offering. What would be appropriate? A fish, or some fruit and wine? Should I build an altar, burn dry seaweed at the entrance, wild herbs? It needs to be something precious, something of value. I can bring my memories. Offer them to the deity of this place. What have I to lose?

——

My first offering, then, is a beach like this, the second summer of our marriage. The vista spreading before us was full of dreams- becoming-plans, the edges of everything plastic with potential. All we needed was time and energy, and we had oceans of each. It was so exciting. We felt like crusaders, just landed, eyes fixed on the holy promise of happiness.(Do dreams litter this beach— all beaches—like redundant shells?). I can still hear her voice as we walked beside the waves.

“I want us to live by the sea. I want it to be part of our life.” “Why not?”

“I’m serious!”

“So am I.”

“I want to fill our house with stuff from the beach, washed-up treasures.”

“I’ve always liked the sea. All those childhood holidays. I feel there’s something missing if I don’t go to the sea every now and then.”

“Why do we have to concede that much? Let’s live here. I mean all the time. One of those cottages set into a hillside above a cove. Just a short walk to the sand. There’d be no need to leave. No tomorrow-going-home, but tomorrow here, and then another tomorrow here, and then…”

All those “tomorrows” of our happy chatter, their details worn, like driftwood. Later, she said something that struck me:

“When I try to imagine God, I visualize a sea, something vast yet intimate, both lapping at your feet and spreading out all ’round you, as far as you can see. A power that links you with everything. A sort of constant essential attention.”

I’d never heard her speak like that. It seemed a deep thing she’d suddenly shown me, drawn from some hidden part of her I’d never glimpsed before. I didn’t know what to say. I remember looking out at the sea—her holy sea—but finding no words, no similar revelation to offer her. I regret that now: my silence. One of many regrets, glib splinters of remorse. Why did we stop trying? When did we realize that more than dreams and energy and time were required? That we didn’t have the tenacity, or the luck, or the temperament to see it through, to will it through? To walk by that same sea all our lives?

——

Our distant ancestors found shorelines to be rich habitats, abundant sources of food. We’ve always searched these places opportunistically, addressing our needs. I’m not scouring the littoral for supper, but these things I’m turning up—these washed-up memories—I wonder if it’s an instinct I’m following, some ancient urge played out where sea and land meet, where worlds join and end? Not much of an offering. Not much of a cave.

II

WE WERE GREAT PLANNERS. Mistrusting chance, we felt the future was too precious to be left to its own devices; it needed husbanding. Like an illustrated medieval calendar, our early marriage was a vivid tapestry of toil and design as we parceled out the arriving time. Schemes came and went, money was earned or borrowed, our youthful energy lavished. We researched, tried and re-tried, failed and tried again. Gradually, our dreams—or at least some version of them—took form: the longed-for cottage, a dog, two goats, chickens, a vegetable patch, all a short walk from the promise of the sea. We only had to cross two fields and negotiate a steep, bramble-clad track before we could stand, every day, at the waves’ edge of our promised land.

One warm, late September afternoon of the third year in our cottage, I wandered down to the spume-flecked sand beyond the dunes at the far end of the shore. A gentle wind broke over me; a faded tawny light bathed everything, softening outlines, washing away any sense of hurry. Standing on sand the color of old linen or faded parchment, I looked out at the sun in the pooling beauty of its end, as gulls slid above me and the water tumbled and frothed in front, and I knew—surely I must have known, more even than I’m remembering it now?—that I was standing at Eden’s edge, the border of my happiness, of our happiness. Did I really not sense the other side of that sunset, some hint of the future that I stare from now? Wasn’t it that which caused me to shiver and walk back quickly, in the mild September breeze, to our little cottage of dreams?

——

Not that our gifts had ended yet. On another mild evening, the following September, we held our infant son as other breezes blew over other waves, and another sunset sank before the family portrait that we made.

——

How did we miss so much of our unraveling before it became too late? Why didn’t we see the paint peeling and the rot spreading in from the edges of our lives more quickly? Why weren’t we on our guard more against what crept in, unnoticed and lethal? Do I worry at this because I have the time to do so now, unlike those busy years that galloped us so fast and so far from our sunset vignette?

——

When the nurse first placed my son in my nervous arms, I marveled at the thereness of him, the exact outlines of his features, each exquisite effort of tiny movement, the vivid actuality of his expressions. He seemed so real that I could almost not believe in him.

His sure, unarguable certainty changed our life together. When the giddy joy had settled, the wonder grown actual, he gradually became the catalyst crystallizing less generous properties hidden in us. We found that we had differences of outlook, mostly on what was better for him. Matters we’d never spoken of, maybe never thought of, before elicited unexpected poles of judgement. His health, play, education, disciplining, toys, diet: all these jagged opinions lay ’round us, heaps of judgment and reaction gathering like piles of driftwood that our baby’s existence unwittingly lit. As the time passed, even casual suppositions, etched more often and with less indifference, took on the deep incisions of permanent divide.

Our times alone with him began to rival the marriage. A bleak jealousy grew in us against the other’s slow theft of hours spent with him. He was a disputed treasure. The sea, no longer a familial backdrop, became a place of individual escape, an exile from the raised voices and bitter silences, from our guilt and anger, the irreparable forgetting of all we’d dreamed. Along its shores now, all those things that had sustained us before our son’s coming were washed away by this bitter new tide.

I wonder if she ever thought, as I did sometimes, what would have happened if we’d stayed as we were, before…?
——

I used to love to take him rockpooling, hoping to pass on something of what I’d felt as a boy when my father and I had lifted pebbles and probed delicate jade fronds in the hope of discovering one of the pool’s hidden denizens. Or studied the slow, deliberate livings of its fleshy anemones and shielded limpets, its huddling mussels and slow, grey snails. I’ve never lost the sense of excitement I feel when I first see a rockpool, its myriad tiny details laid out before me, like a strange city, a full other world, so alive yet so different to the one from which I stare, entranced. He loved it, too, my son, squatting on the rock, leaning over, intent and serious.

“Dad… Daddy, will there be a fish, like last time?”

“I hope so. Or two crabs.”

“You can’t pick them up, though, because of the claw-ers.” “Okay.”

“’Cos of the pinchers.”

“Well, we have a bucket this time. We can put them in there to look at them.”

“If we do, can we take them home to show Mummy?”

“We’ll see.”

“Because she hasn’t seen them, I think.”

“No?”

“No. Not ever, Dad.”

“I’m sure she has.”

“No, Daddy. No, she hasn’t. And we have, you and me, Dad. We’ve seen them!”

“Yes, we’ve seen them. You and me.”

——

I spoke to him recently: one of our rare phone conversations. I asked him about school. He has a girlfriend, I think, though he wouldn’t be drawn. He’s not sure if he wants to be a computer programmer or an ecologist. He says his mother’s well. She’s still with her partner. Her new partner, as I think of him, though he’s the third since we split up. Or the third that I know about; we’ve spoken little. There may have been others. There were for me, though none lasted, and there have been none these last few years.
As she said: “Shut, like a shell.”
——
By the time we moved away from the coast, the sea itself had become a hateful presence, a restless, mocking jibe that lapped hugely at the wreckage that was all we could show for our plans. It’s taken years since then for a different tide to come back: this gray, forgiving indifference that bleaches everything to a faded relic left in the sand.

——

Sentimentally, I wonder if that half-hope of his to be an ecologist has any root in his early life by the sea. He says he doesn’t want to be part of the generation that lost the Earth. Even in their disaster-guilt, the young overestimate their own importance. Yet, he’s grown up with global warming, the damning retreat of the glaciers. I’m as trapped in the ice of my time as my world- worrying boy is in the thawing flood of his. I’m less concerned now for our polluted Arcadia than I am for me, its aging tenant, though perhaps that only indicates the species of selfishness that took so much in its keep for granted. Either way, this is his time. I’ve handed over the keys to whatever’s left. He’s the lord of the rockpool now. And if he has a child, I hope it still offers them its jagged scape of shining pebbles, huddling shells, tiny forests of floating green, and the heartbeat glimpse of a vanishing fish.

III

MY FATHER SPENT HIS LAST WEEKS on a beach of sorts, wandering between cliffs of pain and waves of semi-conscious, drug-relieved reflection. His features hollowed, their new depths shadowing the bones beneath. Brief spells each day saw him calm, thoughtful, articulate, talking quietly to me about the past. I sat with him, made him cups of tea that he rarely drank, arranged his pillows, opened windows, shut them. I listened to him speak, his voice surging and fading as his energies allowed.

——

A couple of years after my wife and I split up, I lived with a woman for a while, moving my few possessions into her ground floor flat. Within months, we knew it was a mistake, my violation of her home somehow symbolically echoed when the flat was burgled. We’d gone out for an afternoon’s mending togetherness which had proved ineffectual. Ironically, our return—to find the sitting room window overlooking the small garden smashed, and the flat littered with the chaos of crime—elicited the last genuine sense of closeness we experienced together. Between her hurried phone call to the police and the questions and form-filling that followed their arrival, we wandered slowly through the rooms in silence, holding each other. What struck me was how exactly like every screen depiction of a burglary it looked: the flung clothes, the rummaged and emptied drawers, the sudden, shocking gaps. It seemed strangely familiar.

So it was with my father’s death. All the apparatus of ending gleaned from tearful film farewells: the plastic medical equipment, the colored pills, the flesh-sweat smell, his drugged, unfathomable exclamations, the long silences regulated by his shallow, labored breathing. It was as if these props-for-a-dying had been dragged from some set designer’s storeroom and arranged recognizably around us, so that he and I had taken our place among their familiarity, having known both them and our roles all our lives.

What was unexpected, as I looked at the tubing and the oxygen tank, the Perspex pill box tray, the thermometer, and the plastic dish for him to spit in, was the surge of outrage I felt that so much of it would soon be decorating the death of someone else, someone not my father. I felt those neutral functioners littering his demise were an integral part of this crucial—I nearly said vital—phase of his existence. If they could not become his even now, if they couldn’t take on at least some of his passing as they fulfilled their role, how could he lay claim to any part of his life? There needed to be, there had to be, subjective relics of his suffering, his fear, his voice faltering in the washed-out ash of another pre-dawn. Why couldn’t he mark his own pain by marking these things with it, etching them with his ending? Why couldn’t he take them with him to the tomb, material witnesses to his last journey, something to gather the dust, laid next to him?

In the end, the closest he got was the pale indecipherable smudge of the sweat stain on his last sheet, which I couldn’t bring myself to get rid of. For years, I kept it in a plastic bag, hidden in a case in the loft. One day, unplanned, I opened the case and unfolded the sheet. Against the bare electric glare of the attic light, I could still make out the faint yellow stains, like a tide line on the fabric of a shore.

I burned it. If I’d known, I could have saved it, brought it here to this cave. It seems appropriate. A winding sheet around the memories that I’m laying in this place, in my half-dead present. Not that I needed a relic. My father’s ghost walks with me everywhere, like the ghost of my marriage, my son’s childhood, my childhood, myself a year ago or even yesterday: standing here in this same spot, thinking similar things. Like grains of sand, these ghosts are milled-down motes of life. Every moment, every sight or thought or feeling, becomes a phantom, drifting away, some of them to return: restless, patternless, haunting fragments, beyond count. A shifting desert of the dead.

——

Once, after a bad morning, he slept for several hours and woke feeling better, lucid and seemingly untouched by the recent pain. He drank some water, sat propped up on his pillows, and stared out the window for a while before saying to me: “You know, I used to be more worried about things than I am now.”

“Yes?”

“This dying: we’re hardwired to its coming. Oh, we might not think about it, might bury our fear of it away, but we always know. Now that it’s happening, I feel there’s something about it—something unstrange from a long time ago—that’s very much a part of me. I’m not saying the wretched pain is easy, but what I feel now is not the fear I had of it at your age.”

“I’m not sure what I feel about it. I do think about it more now, though; it always seems just there, beneath the surface.”

“Yes, but back then—where you are now—I would wake in the night and feel as if this huge nothingness was rushing towards me, like that blast of air when you turn into a passageway on the underground, only it was sucking everything out of my world: my breath, my hopes, my courage, anything around me with which I thought I was building a life. It was quite shocking. I would lie there, really affected by it, an awful empty dread, a fear and hopelessness. To lie in the darkness while your whole existence melted away…I’ve never felt so alone.

“Afterwards, I remember how much simple things helped. Getting up, covered in sweat, still shaking, to make some tea. Standing there, with only the cooker light on, and the warm mug in my hand, looking at all the ordinary objects in the kitchen. God, there’s so much stuff in a kitchen! The heads of the wooden spoons, the saucepan handles, a half-dead plant, your mother’s old teapot that her grandmother gave her. Even the day’s post left by the cooker—the printed, demanding words of a bill—seemed like something from the familiar workaday world, with the same values I had, blundering on, regardless, just like me. I found it so comforting, all of it. The molecules we make our lives from, all lying there around me, ready to be reassembled so that I could start again. Carry on.

Now I don’t need them anymore. But they’re there for you— the indispensable minutiae, the humble bricks with which to build the palace. So simple, really. In all my fear during those times, the little specks were holding me up. Only I didn’t know or had forgotten. You see? I needn’t have worried. You needn’t worry. They’re always there.”

That was his gift to me: the story of his road to a quotidian Damascus, his diminutive gods of the everyday working tirelessly like ants to keep the universe going. When the pain came, perhaps he saw them at work again in the bright little tablets and the white plastic switch he had to press to let the morphine down the line into his wrist. The little details that held him until the end, when he slipped away and left them to their unending Atlas task.

IV

FOR OUR SECOND MEETING to discuss the divorce, my wife had chosen a quiet gastro pub near the park. Our first had been in a coffee shop that filled too quickly, leaving us struggling to make ourselves heard over the chatting and laughter, the demands of toddlers and the insistent chorus of phones. In one of those sudden, unexpected silences a crowded room can produce, my voice’s angered tones had carried on listing some of what I considered to be the more unreasonable stipulations my wife’s lawyer had presented to my lawyer the previous day. Embarrassed, we hurried from the awkward, interrupted lattes.

Now, we sat bathed in a slanting sunlight, alone, among the shaded gray paints of gentrification coloring our behavior. We were quiet, resigned. The legal necessities seemed slight, brittle considerations, weightless afterthoughts we sifted through without rancor. I watched the dust gilded by the late morning light. Staff prepared for the coming lunch. A door opened, closed, opened again. Cutlery rattled; glasses chinked.

“Do you agree to the access conditions?” Her voice sounded weary.

“Yes. Some flexibility…with work, I mean. I might have to change days; I sometimes don’t get much notice.”

“I understand. I don’t want it to be difficult. We can’t let that happen.”

“No.”

She began to take a deep breath but stopped halfway, as if unable not to say: “He’s been a bit quiet.”

“It’s not surprising.”

“The last time you dropped him off…that can’t happen again, a scene like that.”

“No.”

“It’s always going to be our fault, this. Both of us.”

“Yes. It’s just…I still can’t believe it: lawyers and access, all that stuff.”

“That’s how these things are done; it’s a process.”

“Like some medical procedure.”

“Other people get through it; they find a way.”

“I know. I’m sure we will.”

I wasn’t, though. I didn’t doubt we could adapt to our inadequacies. Nor that we would become the civilized ex-couple sharing the burden of guilt and duty. Not even that our son’s life wouldn’t be better off away from the bitter shards of inheritance that were all we would have bequeathed him had we stayed together. What I couldn’t feel sure of, in the calm poise of that morning, was that we could ever maintain any connection at all to the couple that had once so wanted and so welcomed him. How had we damaged the selves we were back then so that we— they—seemed unrecognizable now? How had we come so far from that September day, the three of us by the sea?

After she left the pub, I sat there for a while as the first of the lunchtime customers arrived, feeling as if that September sea had drained away to leave nothing but a parched landscape in which we wandered aimlessly, kicking over the bones that lay around us in the dust, less recognizable every second as the body of the marriage they’d once been.
——

Three years before that second meeting, we’d moved away from the sea to lose ourselves in the city. We’d been at our worst. Barely able to tolerate the other, we’d each embarked on insubstantial, punitive affairs. She carved a new social life, going to classes and joining groups; I found excuses to stay away, or walked alone for hours through the backstreets and parks, along the canal paths and scrublands near the rail lines. She opened her life to deal with her sadness; I shut into the shell of mine.

“You’re so sealed off! So bloody unreachable! It’s like I need a code to get in. You say things now, and I have no idea that’s what you were thinking.”

“Isn’t that why I say them? If you listened more, you might find it’s the same thing I’d said the time before, and the time before that.”

“Oh, how did I know I would be to blame?”

“Well, if you’re accusing someone of being impenetrable, but you’re not listening when they try to tell you what they feel, you can’t only blame them. You see? There’s an example: I’ve just told you what I feel. That’s not being closed.”

“Oh, don’t worry, I know you have no problems telling me bad news when we argue; you seem more than fluent then. But what good is that? I already know what you’re thinking by that stage.”

“Only half-closed then?”

“Stop doing that! Stop focusing on just one thing I’ve said. What about all the other stuff? Why aren’t you talking about that?”

And on, and on…the familiar flayings of a failed love. Strained voices rending the once precious tapestry.

V

I AM STANDING WITH MY MOTHER, holding her hand. We’re on a large beach. To me it seems to spread forever in all directions, except right in front, where the sea is playfully sucking the sand from under the soles of my feet, nudging itself around my ankles, clear wavelets washing small particles of weed over my toes. Half a dead crab’s shell floats past, its pale underside tumbling over and over, the three still-attached legs bending and unbending lifelessly in the current.

“There he is!” my mother shouts. “There’s Dad!”

“Where?”

“There!”

“I can’t see him, Mummy.”

She lifts me up till my head is as high as hers and points ahead of us, out to where larger waves, wide as the beach itself, are hurling themselves towards the shore, piling and shattering as they tumble forward, exploding a whiteness that boils and roars.

“There! Now! See him?”

Desperately, I follow her finger to where the last wave has broken in a storm of spume, the wind carrying the spray back out to sea. In the center of it all, suddenly, is a man, his head dripping, his shoulders glistening as the water smashes around him. He sees us and raises an arm to wave. Against the immaculate surf, his skin shines golden in the sun. He pauses once, to look back out at the sea. Then he turns and walks steadily toward us through the tamed swell.
“Here he comes!” we both shout at once.
——
The light rain is easing. The cliff path here is lined with dripping leaves and grass, the flower petals hung with drops. My trousers are soaked below the knees. The breeze is fitful, unsure. I haven’t seen the forecast, but I sense the weather will resolve itself into something bolder, good or bad, something more certain. Crows are searching the cliff edge, and gulls comb the shore or bob on the calm water beyond the inconspicuous folding of the waves. A woman was walking two dogs here earlier. They sniffed and dug among the high tide line. One of them rolled in something. I can just make out the dark gray shape of an oil tanker heading west. In the next bay, a small fishing boat plies between purple and orange floats, attending to its crab pots. In the field beyond the headland, sheep speckle the slopes.

Next to the nearest rockpool, a large jellyfish lies on its back in the sand. I touch it with my foot, the clear body much firmer than I’d expected. Its other parts, folded tube-like canals colored light orange or dark purple, are tucked beneath its tough rubber center. It seems so alien, such a primitive form for harvesting life. A blob of just viable being, wandering the currents’ will.
——

What am I going to do? Where can I go from here? Everything I’ve tried has failed. Each thing gone, or limping on, broken. A middle-aged man dragging his self-pity around the cliché of a bleak beach.

I wonder what the divinity of this cave thinks. Are you impressed with my offerings, my libations of memory? Eh? No? Too hackneyed? Too glib? You immortals! I should bring you that jellyfish; see what you make of its indifference. I’ve opened up to you, brought my hidden thoughts to your shrine. My wife would be jealous—would have been jealous, once. Before you turn your back on them, they’re all I’ve got.

What can I do? I’ve run out of ideas. Should I just cling on grimly to my father’s everyday objects in the hope that they’ll buoy me up? Perhaps I’ll get washed onto a kinder shore. He was, I think. Carried clear of those nights of fear, the hopeless mid- currents of his life.

——

At my father’s funeral, his oldest friend told a story about their youth that he’d never told anyone before. He and Dad would walk to work along a path that ran between a river and a wooded patch of scrub. A tramp had set up home there, among the litter between the trees and the bramble bushes. He’d built a shelter of pallets and plastic sacking that he sat in front of, drinking and shouting at passersby. He’d become part of the landscape.

One day, they heard a cry of panic and sounds of splashing. When they got to the hovel, they saw the tramp in the river, thrashing feebly several feet from the bank. Dad’s friend said that while he’d tried to find a branch or length of wood, my father had plunged straight in and brought the drowning man, choking, to the safety of the bank. The friend said he’d never told the story to anyone before because he was ashamed of his own hesitation, which he realized had been due to the man being a tramp.

In a choking voice, he confessed into the clear, quiet judgment of the church: “I hadn’t wanted to touch him, his filthiness.”

I don’t think Dad had ever told the story to anyone, either. Certainly not to me. Perhaps it was modesty, or was he protecting his friend? At the reception afterward, I asked his friend what had happened to the tramp. He’d spent some time in the hospital, apparently, then moved away from the river to set up under a disused railway bridge. He was found dead a couple of years later, after a night of hard frost. Alone.

There! An extra offering to soften the sea god’s heart concealed in that recess in the rock. Spare me something, holy spirit, a crumb of wisdom or advice. Leave me something in this cave, something I can take from here to start again with, build around. Something I can hold up to the mirror each morning before another day begins. Something I can show my boy if he comes to see me. Something I can salvage.

——

The weather’s clearing, the clouds thinning above the bay. I might walk that way, to the next cove. See what’s been washed up. The lady who owns the place I’m renting called in this morning to tell me she’s had a cancellation; I can stay for a while longer if I like.

I won’t come back to the cave, though. I’ll leave these days here. There’ll be other places, other spots hidden behind the fabric of things, waiting to be found. That’s how such holiness works. The needy haul their lack around till some cleft or moment in the world admits them, and they lay their griefs on an altar, and their prayers rise.

The sea looks like a gray-white sheet of soft, barely shining cloud, spread all the way to the thin smudge of the horizon. It absorbs the gulls’ cries, and the rhythmic sound of the waves’ gather and fall. There’s something shroud-like about it: unhurried, enveloping. When I look at it, I sense my thoughts beginning to fade, to disappear, as if the water’s calm has covered them, and they are sinking slowly, without a struggle, in its endless patience.
♦
Craig Dobson lives in England. His fiction and poetry have been published in Active Muse, Better Than Starbucks, Black Works, Eunoia Review, Flash, The Frogmore Papers, The Interpreter’s House, Literally Stories, The London Magazine, New Welsh Review, Poetry Ireland Review, Poetry Salzburg Review, The Rialto, Runcible Spoon and THINK. His work is forthcoming in Short Fiction Magazine.

Delmarva Review publishes compelling fiction, nonfiction, and poetry selected from thousands of submissions during the year. Designed to encourage outstanding new writing from the region, the nation, and beyond, the literary journal is nonprofit and independent. Support comes from tax-deductible contributions and a grant from Talbot Arts with funds from the Maryland State Arts Council. Website: www.DelmarvaReview.org

 

Author’s Note: During the pandemic, I wrote roughly 60 poems about Betty; it was interesting to be so absorbed in her world. She is a person of marginal means living in an occupied village somewhere in the rural United States sometime in the future. Betty’s background is similar to mine, but she is hardier and more realistic. In this poem, she is reviewing her physical inheritance and the lives of her relatives.

Betty Has Brass Candlesticks in Her Bedroom

By story, an inheritance from a distant relative—
so distant they owned something.

But her uncle stuffed rags
in the cracks of the walls to keep warm.
Her aunt struggled from picking apples
to become a farmer of this quarter acre.
Did her parents have gold in secret
but preferred potatoes for every meal?

Betty thinks her inheritance
is elsewhere. A dream of travel
to a land where they would be
the lucky sparrows of fields of millet.

⧫

Samn Stockwell has published in the New Yorker, Agni, and Ploughshares, among others. Her two books, Theater of Animals and Recital, won the National Poetry Series (USA) and the Editor’s Prize at Elixir, respectively. Recent poems are in On the Seawall Gargoyle & Sugar House Review and are forthcoming in Plume, and others. She lives in Vermont. Website: www.samnstockwell.org

Delmarva Review publishes compelling original poetry, fiction, and nonfiction selected from thousands of new submissions during the year. Designed to encourage outstanding writing from the region and nationally, the literary journal is nonprofit and independent. Support comes tax-deductible contributions, sales, and a grant from Talbot Arts with funds from the Maryland State Arts Council. Website: www.DelmarvaReview.org

Author’s Note: “Song, Luminescence” comes from the unheard words that came one morning, long after Dad had died in Florida, and Mother in Oregon. I was sitting out back, very early one morning, when I saw glow-worms glimmering in the grass.

Song, Luminescence Leaving
     for my parents, who traveled far

Before the light, the darkness slowly filling
abandoned voices welling in your ear
the shallow neuron pathways still are spilling
chords and stories here and almost here 

Above your eyes the constellations dimming
they founder in the ever-deeper dawn
and in the shadows glowworms slowly glimmering
your phosphorescence flickers and is gone

All you know began with their dark dreaming
shy caress, and sweetly lulling breath
All your songs are stolen from her seeming
your silence from the silences he left 

You cannot stop one hour’s slowest spinning
their thousand roads are photos you can’t name
their leavings taught you loss is a beginning
their contours map the Odysseys you claim

Say goodbye to luminescence leaving
say goodbye to shadow voices gone
Take the stories’ doubt and yet believing
take the roadways fading into dawn 

♦

Maryland poet Judith McCombs grew up nomadic, in a geodetic surveyor’s family. She has won Maryland Arts Council’s highest Award for poetry. A former Detroit Arts College professor and visual artist, she founded Kensington Row Bookshop’s Poetry Readings in Maryland and is vice president of Federal Poets. Her poems have appeared in Delmarva Review, Potomac Review (Poetry Prize), Saranac Review, Innisfree, Nimrod (Neruda Award), Poetry, Shenandoah (Graybeal-Gowen Prize); and The Habit of Fire: Poems Selected & New.

Delmarva Review publishes evocative original poetry,  fiction, and nonfiction selected from thousands of new submissions during the year. Designed to encourage outstanding writing from the region and beyond, the literary journal is nonprofit and independent. Support comes tax-deductible contributions, sales, and a grant from Talbot Arts with funds from the Maryland State Arts Council. Website: www.DelmarvaReview.org 

 

 

 

 

Editor’s Note: The best “flash” or very short nonfiction connects with readers on several levels by compressing writing, inviting one’s imagination to expand meanings and feelings from the author’s evocative words. Billie Pritchett’s piece is a compelling example.

Author’s Note: In this story, I try to capture a little of what it was like when I was a boy growing up poor in western Kentucky. Material poverty created in me a poverty of psychology. Now I know the only way to combat the poverty mindset is whatever pride I can muster and proximity to good people. Father never discovered the second option for himself, unfortunately.

What Makes a Home a Trailer

A MOBILE HOME, FACTORY-MADE; a prefabricated home: that’s what a trailer is, that’s what it’s supposed to be, but tell that to the boys on the school bus. 

“Billie lives in a trailer.”“No, I don’t.”

“Hah-hah. Your home’s a trailer.” 

“Nuh-uh. My dad built it.”

“Why’s it look like a doublewide then?” 

I couldn’t answer.

I told my father what they said. 

“It is not a trailer.” It was obvious my father was upset. He looked off and gritted his teeth. He was sweating from beneath his Indiana Jones fedora. “Next time they say it’s a trailer, you tell them I built this place.” 

“I already told them.” 

What my father could never understand—what I couldn’t understand—was that it didn’t matter what the word trailer denoted in the red Merriam-Webster’s on our little living room bookshelf. It only mattered what people thought it meant. It meant carrot-colored bottles of pain pills in the kitchen cabinets, parents who didn’t work, Social Security checks in the mailbox, an overgrown front yard, a broken-down car in the gravel drive, all of which were fixtures and features of our lives, they were around us, you could point to them. My father had let the place go five years after building it, ten years after I was born. 

When I came to him with my lament at age ten about the boys on the bus, he was lying on the living room couch, his head on the armrest, his fedora hat casting a shadow down to his lower, quivering lip. He said, “You tell them this: your father is a proud man.” 

Billie Pritchett is assistant professor of English in the Department of Undeclared Majors at Kyungnam University in Masan, Korea. His hometown is Murray, Kentucky.

Delmarva Review publishes evocative original creative nonfiction, poetry, and fiction, selected from thousands of submissions annually. Designed to encourage outstanding new writing, the literary journal is nonprofit and independent. Support comes from tax-deductible contributions, sales, and a grant from Talbot Arts with funds from the Maryland State Arts Council. Website: DelmarvaReview.org.

 

 

Author’s Note: I thought the best way to capture the Insurrection of Jan. 6, 2021, was to make the day’s most famous headgear a narrator for the event. This is the first (and only) poem that I have written from the viewpoint of a hat. A class taught by Maryland poet Ann Quinn inspired me to try this technique, and it made this poem so satisfying to write.

The Horned Hat at the Insurrection

Stitched by minnow fingers
pebble-skipping over tufted
fake fur, one of oh-so-many,
I confess I was meant
for a stage smaller than this.
A community production
of O, Pioneers! perhaps?
God, look at me, I grand marshal
this snake train of tobacco-
stained, piss-scented
would-be Vikings,
the haberdashery helming
a pinwheel platform.
Circling parquet corridors
with flags and the false GPS
of rigged moral compasses,
oh, they are indeed pioneers.
Bow hunters—Antaeus waiting
for a fist fight, forging ground
on hallowed ground.
Glory, I could have been a mascot,
a bombastic bison, big horned,
bugling, canon-shot badassery,
not the taxidermy footnote
in the unraveling of democracy.

⧫

Maryland poet Jessica Gregg is a former journalist whose poetry has also appeared in Broadkill Review, Canary, Yellow Arrow Journal, Global Poemic, Tiny Seed Literary Journal, and Art in the Time of Covid-19 from the American Writers Review. Her chapbook, News from This Lonesome City, was published in 2019.

Delmarva Review publishes evocative original poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction selected from thousands of submissions annually. Designed to encourage outstanding new writing from the region and beyond, the literary journal is nonprofit and independent. Financial support comes from tax-deductible contributions, sales, and a grant from the Talbot Arts Council with funds from the Maryland State Arts Council. Website: DelmarvaReview.org.

 

Author’s Note: I write a lot about relationships, love, and other mysterious events, so perplexing events and issues interest me. Zen is perfect for that, of course, since the koan is, by definition, a paradox that illustrates how inadequate logic is. Its contemplation is seen as a vehicle toward enlightenment. The jumbled state of emotion, the complications of being and the bodily state—its flesh and consciousness—to me, these are related and ultimately unfathomable, but as a poet, I must try.

Zen and the Art of Transfiguration: 4 Koans

1.
Would suicides
feel the irony,
if they return
in the bodies
of tortoises,
doomed
to longevity?

2.
If you put
your whole
life
into a painting,
are you the art,
or are you
the artist?

3.
Are bunyip,
crying nocturnes
from riverbeds
in their hunger for
women’s flesh,
merely restless
barking owls?

4.
When you don’t
like the dream
you awake from,
do you get
another chance
as you drift into
asleep again?

⧫

Susana H. Case has authored five chapbooks and eight books of poetry, most recently The Damage Done (Broadstone Books, 2022), which won her third Pinnacle Book Achievement Award. Her books have previously won an IPPY and a New York City Big Book Distinguished Favorite award. She was a finalist for the Eric Hoffer Book Award and the International Book Awards. She co-edited, with Margo Taft Stever, the anthology I Wanna Be Loved by You: Poems on Marilyn Monroe (Milk and Cake Press, 2022). Dr. Case worked several decades as a professor and program coordinator at New York Institute of Technology. Website: www.susanahcase.com.

Delmarva Review publishes evocative new poetry, fiction, and nonfiction selected from thousands of original submissions annually. Designed to encourage outstanding writing, the literary journal is nonprofit and independent. Support comes from tax-deductible contributions, sales, and a grant from Talbot Arts with funds from the Maryland State Arts Council. Website: www.DelmarvaReview.org.

 

Author’s Note: As an East Coast suburban boy, light pollution meant I never saw the Milky Way until a trip out West. Our children were getting older, soon to college and busy lives, and only my wife had ever been to the southwest, so we planned a trip for December 2018. That moment—to try to put into words what it means to look up and be dazzled, even when you intellectually know what you’re going to see—still fills me with wonder.

the milky way at 47

I never saw it before, never understood what it was
when people talked about it, sure, I guess I saw it
in movies but never connected that to the real

even in mongolia we never saw it, though that is
a place people use for stargazing, with the steppes
and no light for miles, but it was cloudy three days

and we never glimpsed a star. so take me to monument
valley, utah, on a night in december, and let the two
younger kids sit in the room and veg out while we

(meaning wife and oldest daughter) take the rented car
down the road a few miles, between the buttes and
silent monuments, to the pullout on route 163 just

over the arizona state line, and wait as the last car
passes us. we get out and turn off the engine, kill
the lights, scuff across the gravel shoulder to lean our

backs against the cold metal of the SUV and look
up, up to what I never understood, what I knew
only in abstract. oh. oh, now I see. infinity.

⧫

David Galloway is a writer and associate professor of Russian at Hobart & William Smith Colleges. Born and raised in Maryland, he has lived in upstate New York for the past twenty-five years. His poetry and essays have also appeared in Atlanta Review, Rattle, Chiron, Typehouse, Gargoyle, and Penn Review, among others. He is the author of “poyms for people” (Kelsay Books, 2021), his first full-length collection. Website: davidjgalloway.com

Delmarva Review publishes evocative new poetry, fiction, and nonfiction selected from thousands of submissions annually. Designed to encourage outstanding writing, the literary journal is nonprofit and independent. Support comes from sales, tax-deductible contributions, and a grant from Talbot Arts with funds from the Maryland State Arts Council. Website: DelmarvaReview.org.

Author’s Note: At middle age, I went on one of the most exciting outdoor adventures of my life. While I was there, the experience reminded me of a similar adventure I had done when I was going through my “quarter-life crisis” that I had kind of forgotten about. What did it mean to bounce these two trips off each other, to mirror one against the other? What had I learned, if anything, from then until now. It took me four years of writing this essay to find the story, to find and realize what these trips had taught me about myself and the ways life and age change us all.

From Hell’s Half-Mile to Powerhouse

No woman ever steps in the same river twice, 

for it’s not the same river, 

and she’s not the same woman. 

  —with thanks to Heraclitus, et al. 

A  COWBOY, a fireman, a fisheries biologist, two foresters, two botanists, three nurses, six guides, plus a naturalist and a writer, walk onto the rafts. This is no joke: From places near and far, we descended upon Idaho and chartered a backcountry plane to drop us off in the middle of the Frank Church River of No Return Wilderness, the largest roadless area in the lower 48, to begin a six-day whitewater adventure on the Middle Fork of the Salmon River, one of the deepest gorges in North America. 

With two years of angst and anxiety under my belt in anticipation of this trip, I choose one of the “leisure boats” with Neil and some others. The leisure boat is the “safe” boat in my mind, an oar raft where a very well-trained guide, to whom we are paying a hefty sum, does all the work of rowing and maneuvering and keeping us from harm, and we guests just sit on top, amid the luggage, equipment, and supplies, and enjoy the view, 2.3 million acres of jagged western wilderness. 

Two years is a lot of time to know something is coming in advance and to think about it and worry about it and come up with all the ways injury and death could occur, or at least discomfort. Over the past twenty-four months, every time the river trip crossed my mind, my stomach lurched. Anytime it was mentioned aloud and a friend oohed and aahed over the opportunity I would have, all I could say was that I hoped to make it back alive. I was serious about that. I did not want to fall out of the raft into the icy water, hit my head on a rock, break an arm or a leg, get caught in a “window shade,” drown, or any of the other river catastrophes I’d heard about. I wanted adventure, but, at middle age, I wanted to come home unscathed. 

Even though I’m on the leisure boat and we’ve had a brief safety training, I’m still nervous about some other unknowns, such as whether Neil and I will sleep well while camping. And what about the bathroom situation?—will we have enough time in the morning, with twenty-eight other people, to do our business? On the raft, will we be self-conscious of our bodies, not so tight and firm anymore? 

And how will I fit into this crowd? We are with twenty of Neil’s old friends and their spouses from when he lived in Idaho thirty years ago working as a surveyor for the U.S. Forest Service. The group lucked out with a permit gained through a lottery system and organized the trip to reunite after one man’s newfound health after overcoming cancer, to celebrate recovery, retirements, and annual rebirth. At age forty-six, I am the youngest of this group of sixty-and seventy-somethings, and Neil’s retirement from teaching at a nature center is one year away. All these older folks seem joyful and free spirited and unafraid, and yet I’m still obsessing that this trip might be my last. 

As we shove away from the launch site at Boundary Creek and start out bobbing under a cloudless sky of cerulean blue, I recite my mantra in my head: I will not fall out of the raft. I cannot find an unawkward strap to hold on to as we nearly immediately hit a series of rapids—Sulphur Slide, Ramshorn Rapid, Hell’s Half-Mile, Velvet Falls, and The Chutes—and one person on my raft, a retiree who spends half the year in Arizona and half in Mexico, somehow loses her balance and does a sort of half backflip over the side of the raft. Then she gracefully rewinds herself back in, a maneuver that resolves itself so fast that no one, including her, even knows how it happened. It is like a mirage. She doesn’t even get wet. 

Before I know it, we’ve glided over a bunch of churning disturbances—rock gardens—with ease, no doubt due to the deft maneuvering on the part of the experienced guide, and the day begins to open for me; the crushing fear releases its hold a bit. I can see the churning ahead—the wide highway of slate gray, khaki green river, with occasional areas of bubbling white froth and peaks like sharks rising. Sometimes the water gets darker, a moonlight blue next to deep boulders; sometimes the canyon narrows, or an obstacle appears that agitates the water. And then the raft bounces and jostles over whatever’s underneath causing the riffles, and our bodies jiggle side to side, front to back—we have to allow ourselves a looseness of form, a sway of hips and spine, and go with the “river massage” when it’s offered—and we get splashed with icy buckets of snowmelt. But then, in a moment, the water is calm again, see-through to the bottom, covered in bowling-ball boulders. 

The raft, I start to remember from a time long ago, with its air and loft, cushions the rapids. I don’t even come close to falling out in the first few hours. This expert guide team has run this river hundreds of times, scouting many of the three hundred rapids, memorizing each curve and eddy to perfection, knowing each drop during the 3,100 feet of descent and the one hundred tributaries that will join the Middle Fork along the way. I dare, for the first time in weeks or months, to let out my breath. 

——

IN OUR FIRST DAY’S ORIENTATION, learning about river life and the types of rafts we can float on this trip, one of our guides, who wants us to revel in our good fortune of being here, tells us with dramatic emphasis and pauses that we are thirty of only ten thousand people in the world who will get to experience this river this year. Ten thousand seems like a lot of people to me, and I will be perplexed in days to come when we camp at well- worn beaches and in forests with clear human-made paths and established tent sites and see numerous other rafts and dozens of other people every day along the river—eco-groovy families and guided fishermen in dories—because these imprints of humans don’t jibe with my idea of wilderness. 

It is upon first mention of this number of people that I recall my previous, and first, river trip, on the North Fork of the Koyukuk River in Alaska. We didn’t see another person in six days on the river, and groups (if there were any other than us) were not even allowed to travel with more than six people. We didn’t sign up for reserved campsites in advance; we floated up to whatever sandy or rocky beach we came across and set up camp whenever we wished, day or night, in the land of the midnight sun, leaving no trace of our fleeting habitation. 

Up there, in Gates of the Arctic National Park and Preserve, above the Arctic Circle, only two thousand people visited the entire 8.4 million-acre park each year; our group of four participants and two instructor-guides saw only two people in eighteen days, passing them on foot during the backpacking portion of our trip, which was odd because there are no roads and no trails in the hummocks and scree fields of the Brooks Range. 

I was twenty-five then, with only a few years of camping and backpacking experience, no river experience, no expectations, not much knowledge, and not much fear, entering a place where proficiency in wilderness skills was necessary for survival. I was an Alaskaphile, and the Outward-Bound trip was the best way I had figured out to get to see the inner sanctum of Alaska that few people ever visit. More importantly, it was the way I had decided to address what I called my “quarter-life crisis” and take stock of what I was doing with my life, whether the office job and corporate ladder track was where I wanted to be. 

In August of that year, 1996, whitewater was sparse on the river; I would learn later that the North Fork of the Koyukuk was only a Class I and II river, not expected to have much more than ripples—and the water was low that summer, so low that our group had to paddle hard all day, every day, to get anywhere, blistering my hands and splitting my fingers into bloody canyons from the wetness and friction. I was unaccustomed to that kind of work. As I was the oldest participant on the trip and the only one with a job, one of the three nineteen-year-olds who were my trip- mates nicknamed me “Office Hands.” 

I may be the only one with a job on this trip as well, self- employed with my multiple part-time gigs. But unlike the Outward-Bound adventure, whose mission was to change lives through challenge and discovery and for which I had hoped for self-reflection but gained none and to make lifelong friendships but did not, I’m not here in Idaho on this river with these people to learn anything about myself or to prove anything to myself or to change anything or to gain any new skills or necessarily to bond with anyone. I’m here on this mid-life river trip in Idaho in support of Neil and his friends, and it’s supposed to be for fun and relaxation and an abandonment of responsibilities and all life’s “shoulds”; to be taken care of, cooked for, and cleaned up after. I’m not looking back to the ghosts of lives I could have led; I’m not looking ahead to life’s next act. 

With the Alaska memory sparked, my body begins to remember that it has already been on a river. It recalls the way the raft glides over a patch of silky water, slipping on top of a surface boulder and making no splash on the descent. It knows that the bubbles in the brewing beast only indicate the deepest water, not something more sinister; that the river points our best route forward with arrows of whitewater, nature’s subtle navigation signal; and that a jarring bounce off a boulder will send the raft into a backwards twirl. I begin to recognize the river like a home I once knew, a dream I once had, a meal prepared for me in a foreign land that waters my mouth once again. 

The snake of the river slices through tall, straight, and relatively young evergreen trees like lodgepole pine, covering the brown mountains around us like a porcupine, hour after hour. Though a significantly different landscape than my regular environment in Virginia, the high desert color palette is unending and unchanging. I feel like a dead twig watching the scenery go by, bored by the inactivity on the leisure boat, while our guides seem to be relishing the mystery and thrill of each new moment of “man versus river.” I start to consider that I have five more days of passive unengagement, and by the end of the day I decide I will become a more active participant and hop on the paddle boat instead, where a guide gives commands from the back to four to eight of us paddlers who make up the crew and do the work. After this single day on the river, I no longer fear the Class III (“medium”), and Class IV (“difficult”) rapids I had built up in my mind for more than seven hundred days, that torrent of water plunging a gradient steeper than the Colorado River traveling down the Grand Canyon. I don the Neoprene gloves I brought to prevent “office hands,” and I slide back into the rhythms of the river I remember. 

——

IN ALASKA, there was no question that we would never fall into the water because there were no significant rapids. But before this Idaho trip, I had wondered, intensely, how people sitting with one butt cheek on the side edge of the raft, paddling through high and irregular waves, roiling waters, tight turns, and dangerous holes could possibly stay in the boat on a Class II – IV river. 

I learn it on day two. 

It’s a matter of weight, friction, and force. I jam my inside foot under a baffle that runs across the center of the raft, and I jam my outside foot under the side of the raft until I am stuck. Neither leg, really, is in the right plane with itself: my shins are at a wrong angle compared to my knees, and my thighs are also at a wrong angle compared to my knees, as well as compared to my ankles, hips, and torso. At the end of a paddling day, I’ll discover, the tendons, joints, ligaments, and fascia of my legs will have taken a beating without even having walked. And despite wearing neoprene booties inside my Keens, my toenails and skin become nasty from my feet sitting in cold water all day. But the essential miracle here, and what I hang onto is: with the feet tucked in as such, I do not seem to be able to fall out of the raft. 

Thus, I find my groove. I test out paddling on the right side of the raft, find it awkward even as I am right-handed, and then discover my good side on the left. I find out too that attacking the shark fins of curling waves in whitewater with our paddles in a metronomic rhythm keeps us in the raft. What looks monstrous, I realize quickly, can be stabbed into submission by human force and the friction of plastic against water. In my green hard-hat helmet, as the parched brown dryness of the rugged, mountain landscape drifts by, I jab the boiling water with gusto that afternoon. Like in Alaska, where my survival and that of five others depended on each of us learning to play an active role, I am pleasantly confident in taking back some of the responsibility for my survival. 

I settle into a spot as the second paddler on the left behind the fireman/paramedic who offers the group a variety of legal and illegal painkillers, smooth-talks the men and women alike with a conspiratory close-in lean, and who apparently earned the nickname “Hollywood” when he was young. He’s still thin and handsome, grey-haired now, and he knows how to set and keep a pace, which is what the guides tell him is his job as the foreman. I try to mimic him exactly. Lean forward with my whole upper body, dig in or spear the water with my paddle, pull back; lean forward, dig in, pull back. We paddle up to thirty strokes at a time upon the guide’s command: “forward,” “back,” or “drift.” One stab at a time, like the daily, weekly, annual, and lifelong journey navigating the river of life, aiming toward some shore, launching back into the waters, repeat. 

In this way, we conquer Powerhouse Rapids, Artillery Rapids, Cannon Creek Rapids, and Pistol Creek Rapid, the sound of each preceding its presence, almost a spreading open of the river like a zipper as the whitewater unfurls around us and we pass through.

 

——

THE MIDDLE FORK OF THE SALMON is a 100-mile Wild and Scenic River, protected by Congress in 1968 in the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act, which means it is a free-flowing river with no dams, and so water levels are dictated by nature, not by man. This status is a rare occurrence in the nation now. According to the nonprofit organization American Rivers, less than one percent of America’s rivers are wild and free. Instead, most are dammed for recreation, water storage, hydroelectric power, irrigation, and flood control. Here, in mid-July, the waters are considered to be at three-and-a-half feet, and we will travel on average sixteen miles a day over six days, whereas just a month ago in June, waters were at nine feet and the guides traveled the river in about two days due to the great volume and speed of the torrent. 

The North Fork of the Koyukuk in Alaska is also a 100-mile Wild and Scenic River, but I didn’t know that then. On that trip, I was four years out of college, veering off the typical path already, taking a month off work with a plan to write about the journey, plunging myself into the outer reaches of my comfort zone for the first time. I literally had no map. 

I had never hiked, camped, or backpacked without Neil or been without him in an outdoor adventure setting at all, having been raised as a city girl who never even learned how to ride a bike. He taught me everything I knew in the outdoors: survival, weather, maps, gear. I had been a follower in all of it, though, not a leader, not even a team player. I had never walked such a thin rope all by myself as in Alaska. 

I thought the great life lessons of the trip would come from the deep connections I would form with people traveling the same path—literally by my side while doing all of the work of surviving in such a backcountry area, a grizzly-bear habitat, completely off the grid including sometimes without radio contact, without any tethers of human civilization, a situation that was wholly unfamiliar to me—as well as going through similar or forthcoming stages of life; people who understood me, who could help me see a path. But the instructors had placed me into the group of teens rather than the other group of thirty- and forty- year-olds. How was I supposed to learn anything about myself with kids who still had mom and dad cooking their meals back home and who were sent here by their parents, while I was a professional in the workforce, having worked for my own funds to attend this trip, with a soon-to-be-husband back home? 

While I was teaching those teenagers how to make a cheese sauce with the last few ingredients we had left late in the trip, I was also backpacking with a pack that weighed about half my body weight, 70 pounds, traversing a scree field a thousand or more feet high on a path we created that was the width of our own boot prints, and navigating alone in my head the complicated mental challenges of a group leader with anger management issues, the physical demands of the journey, and what it was all supposed to teach me about myself. 

Now in Idaho, a half a lifetime later, I notice I’m infinitely more adept at all the rituals that being a traveling caravan off the grid and on the river requires. And although Neil and I are here together, he decides to stay on the leisure boat, so we don’t spend the trip side by side. I choose to have my own separate experience. He takes two optional hikes that I decline on. I revel in the yoga circle our guides lead each morning, finding great comfort, joy, and empowerment in being among a familiar language from my practice back home, while he somehow manages to avoid it every day. 

Perhaps I am at last recognizing the lessons of Alaska; for the first time since that trip twenty-two years ago and the first time in our marriage, I realize I have become my own person. I have, in fact, become—the same way a wild river runs its natural course when allowed to be undammed. 

——

RUNNING THE RIVER STARTS TO SEEM LIKE OLD HAT, and I keep the same position on day three for the drop at Marble Creek Rapids, the drop and jog of Jackass Rapids, and the bend at Island and Riffle. I’m starting to feel pretty badass about my skill set, having remained in the boat so far, and so on day four, which the guides tell us offers the biggest whitewater yet, I am as hungry for the rapids as a wild dog. 

The guides rise at 5:30 a.m. at the start of yet another bluebird day and set out the first breakfast—coffee, yogurt, oatmeal, and fruit—while getting the hot, made-to-order second breakfast underway—eggs, pancakes, bacon, and French toast— to fortify our day’s exertion. We clients shuffle around, having slept well enough and in a private-enough location of our choosing, packing up our own tent and personal things like we do every day, and the guides carry the tents, sleeping pads, drybags, kitchen gear, bathroom gear, and everything else down a treacherous slope to the river and load five boats. Their chores take at least five hours each morning. I appreciate this luxury because in Alaska, we Outward Bound students were the ones making breakfast, cleaning up camp, packing belongings, and loading the rafts, an ordeal that took three to four hours and was hard on the hands. Here, after all the loading, one oarsman or oarswoman takes off, captaining the “sweep,” a Huck-Finn-like freighter raft that carries all our “checked baggage” and camp and kitchen equipment to our next overnight place and sets it up there before we arrive. 

We’ve been bath rooming now for four days, getting through it just fine. In Gates of the Arctic in Alaska, administered by the National Park Service, we were not allowed to put anything into the river: no cooking materials, no body oils, no body fluids or solids. We dug cat-holes in the woods for poop and toilet paper. We had to sing to ourselves to ward off grizzly bears. Here on the Middle Fork, within the Challis, Payette, and Salmon National Forests, managed by the U.S. Forest Service, we’ve been instructed to pee in the river, not on land, because with all the ten thousand people using the same lands, the soil and campsites would start to smell like urine. When we’re on land, men simply unzip and pee directly into the water; women squat at the edge strategically behind a wisp of plant. Or, if we pull over in our raft out of the current for a moment for a pee break, we may all simply hurl ourselves over the side of the raft, wade in the river up to our waists in our pants, and stare at each other across the raft as we pee into the water together in our clothes. All of us are totally used to this now, and it’s far easier than worrying about surviving a grizzly attack. At camp, the guides set up a glorified ammo can called the “groover” for pooping, in a spot set away from camp in the woods with a scenic view of the river. A separate pee bucket for nighttime use is set up in the bathroom-without-walls as well. Among all their other morning chores, the guides also collect and seal the groover and carry it onto the raft for disposal at the end of the journey, and they dump the pee bucket into the river. 

Day four, with its icy white sky, unfolds with Tappan I, Tappan Falls, Tappan II, Tappan III, Aparejo Point Rapids, and Jack Creek Rapids: they range from quick steep drops into large holes, to Class IIIs to IVs that the guides have to get out of the boat and scout in advance, to a series of constricted drops over a half-mile stretch. The team on my boat is fairly solidified now: the fireman, me, and a cadre of 60+-year-old women who are fearless and inspiring, with not a judgmental one among them; women of all shapes and sizes and life experiences: kind, independent, fit, and full of joy—not broken by burdens, despite enduring many of life’s hardest trials. I didn’t come to the river to take inspiration from anyone, and yet these women begin forming a picture in my mind of what a later-life woman can look like, in strength and power, a model I have never even considered that I will need in my days ahead. I had not expected to fall into such easy camaraderie. To my great surprise, this spontaneous bond forms without effort, and our team—all of us who have chosen to be here, on this boat, paddling, fiercely attuned to the moment—attacks the water wordlessly like a fine-tuned machine. 

It is on one of these rapids that, without warning, without dreading it, without planning, without intellectualizing, we come up fast on a large black boulder in the river. In a flash, our large, bulbous, steady, safe vessel that’s been so gentle and protective all week, absorbing all our potential breaks and bruises, veers up vertically on the right in a dramatic 45-degree angle: that perfect moment like in a cartoon when a character is suspended in air before falling. No one screams, no one loses a breath, no one’s stomach knots. 

“Lean!” someone yells, and we enact a maneuver we were trained to do during the first day’s orientation to keep the boat from flipping when it rides up high on one side: Each of us physically stands up, lays forward, or otherwise springs from position in order to lean into that terrifying high side of the boat with our full body weight. And so, all the weight of our eight perfect, imperfect, forgiving, forgiven selves rise up against the forces of gravity trying to take us down, trying to flip that boat and land us all in the churning water in the middle of a chute. 

The moment is over in an instant. The boat lowers itself as if it had no intention of becoming upside down, and we paddle away like that’s what we were born to do. We end our day— dry—at Little Pine Camp with a meal of antipasto, lasagna, sausages, Caesar salad, and tiramisu, cooked up by our jubilant yogi-poet-chef guides whose gentle lessons in the ways of the river have taught me to trust. 

——

THE SKY MOVES UP THE CANYON WALL now as we descend into a deep, dark cut of Idaho batholith: the Impassable Canyon, named during the Sheepeater Indian War of 1879 with the Shoshone-Bannock Tuka-Deka people who lived there, when the U.S. Army could no longer find a way to pass through the river’s canyon on horseback. Tall black rock rises up around us, and the river narrows. Here, in this chasm of earth, I feel very remote, indeed. 

Even the sun can’t find us this deep. No watercolor-sunsets at Tumble Creek Camp on our last night, but we are surrounded by the orange glow of ponderosa pines. A campfire brightens the evening, and we snarf down our pistachio- and date-encrusted brie plate, our grilled Brussels sprouts with cherries and apples, the rosemary lemon chicken and cheesy polenta, our still-cold- and-fresh salad from one of the giant coolers kept aboard the sweep, our carrot cake, our beer, and our huckleberry-vodka- with-lemon cocktails. Cowboys and foresters dress up in lingerie from the costume bag that’s been unleashed for this last hurrah. Men and women paint their toenails in rainbow colors. Neil puts on a wig. I don a tutu and Mardi-Gras-bead headdress. And Karyn the geriatric nurse drapes her substantial bra-less bosom over the heads of the twenty-something year old menfolk guides seated on camp chairs, as a parting gift of love. We dance around the firelight, and most of the group drinks into the wee hours. 

I make my way to the tent by myself in the dark while Neil stays up with the group. Whereas in Alaska, the landscape was so quiet and empty that I never even heard a bird song and I craved community with others, here on this last night, I want to take a little space, a moment to be quiet, to listen, to read, to reflect. My internal landscape wants to absorb and remember the external landscape: alive, authentic, simple, and free. 

The next day, the Middle Fork ends at the main Salmon River, just as the North Fork of the Koyukuk terminated at the Middle Fork of the Koyukuk—both river trips of my life beginning at the origin of the river and ending at the terminus, like complete narrative stories with beginnings, middles, and ends, in and of themselves. The guides tell me this arrangement is not typical for raft trips, which usually cover a small segment of a very long river where you see no beginning and no end. We travel two hours by school bus on crude dirt forest roads, and eventually hop on a turbulent hour-and-a-half backcountry flight, which soars 10,000 feet over the river canyon that had been our home for nearly a week, back to McCall, Idaho, where Neil used to live and work in the forest with this very crowd. We hug goodbye to these good people, check into our hotel room, and ride out the bliss of river life for another few days. 

For weeks and months before signing up for this trip and paying the high fees, Neil and I hemmed and hawed about whether we should go. We debated and discussed, rehashing all the same issues over and over, both of us terrible at decision-making, each one wanting to please and not overburden the other. Finally, after many sleepless nights, I said to Neil: It comes down to this. What we are deciding is what kind of people we want to be, or what kind of people we are: The kind of people who take the opportunity to have the trip of a lifetime, with all its risks and uncertainties, ups and downs, and potential for life-changing rewards; or the kind of people who don’t. 

Now that it’s all over and we are back to our normal lives, remembering our wild and free days on the river in that remote, faraway place that, truly, so few people in the world will ever know, it is a relief and a revelation to me that we chose to go. 

I’d been on a river before, and what I did in Alaska was in many ways a riskier trip, more remote, more at stake. I didn’t know that then because I had the confidence and ignorance of a younger person. On the last day in the Brooks Range in Alaska, we heard the news that a lawyer from Washington DC had been mauled and killed by a grizzly bear in the same corridor we’d been traveling. We had not seen more than a mud print of a grizzly bear track, had spent the eighteen days in Alaska in virtual wildlife-silence. But it could have just as easily been one of us. It could have been me. During that Alaska trip, the first of many steps I would take to steer away from a traditional work and family life, I had been badass before I even knew what badass was. 

Did the wild and scenic rivers of my life teach me anything after all? 

Yes, they did: Possibility. 

I asked the river to intoxicate me once, as the poet Baudelaire suggested, and it grudgingly nourished me with the gift of inner strength. And then I allowed the river to intoxicate me again, soothing me with its endless rolling song, like the wind, the wave, the star, the bird. And in doing so, I found, thrillingly, that when I dared to take the leap into the wide-open unknown once again, the river rose up to meet me. 

♦ 

Sue Eisenfeld’s essays have been listed five times among “Notable Essays” in The Best American Essays. From Arlington, Virginia, she writes about nature, travel, adventure, history, and culture. She is the author of Wandering Dixie: Dispatches from the Lost Jewish South and Shenandoah: A Story of Conservation and Betrayal. Website: www.sueeisenfeld.com.

Delmarva Review publishes compelling new nonfiction, fiction, and poetry selected annually from thousands of submissions worldwide. Financial support for the nonprofit literary journal is from tax-deductible contributions, sales, and a grant from the Talbot Arts Council with funds from the Maryland State Arts Council. Website: DelmarvaReview.org.

#  #  #

 

Author’s Note: As a girl, I made frequent canoe trips to this pond with my parents. Decades later, a spontaneous excursion with my grown sons left impressions that reverberated with surprising intensity. And yet, it was such a small moment. What act—an act of observation or a suspension of knowing—opens the door?

Still Life

My son who is now a man suns
stork-like on a log, one leg dangling
over water—he is driftwood, bleached
clean. There is swimming in the lily
pads, and drying with tiny towels,
the grit of sand to wipe away
before the socks. A day that slingshots
through my reckoning and lodges
somewhere, behind—I look down
on a mosaic of black mussels
nestled in the shoals and find
strangers in the grown bodies
of sons. Next time there may be
grasses. Rain. A picnic of plums.

⧫

Kathryn Weld is a professor of mathematics at Manhattan College. Her writing has appeared in Bellevue Literary Review, Midwest Quarterly, Southeast Review, , Cortlandt Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Connotations Press, Still, the Journal, and others. She published a chapbook in 2019, Waking Light (Kattywompus Press). Website: Manhattan.edu/campus-directory/kathryn.weld.

Delmarva Review publishes evocative new poetry and prose selected from thousands of submissions annually. Designed to encourage outstanding writing, the literary journal is nonprofit and independent. Financial support is from tax-deductible contributions, sales, and a grant from the Talbot County Arts Council with funds from the Maryland State Arts Council. Website: DelmarvaReview.org.