Well, there's much more important stuff going on (I'm listening to Woody Guthrie's song about the Ludlow Massacre while writing this), but this is a story I've been working on for awhile, wanted to share it with the community. Feedback & critiques welcome!
I saw the carp on my first loop of the island. It thrashed as I passed it, startled by the thud of my step. I sensed its strandedness, how its back crested vulnerable over the water, wondered that it had pushed so far inland, or had maybe been left here by the flood's faltering crest, receding now.
I was running, practicing peripheral awareness. I was trying to deflect my attention from the monotone rut of my feet, to the world around, trees and insects, flowers and birdcalls. And yet I would I would always slip back into watching the path ahead of my feet, pulled back in by the focal necessity, the recurrence of gravity and impact, of movement and balance.
I was running a padded-dirt trail, soft-rounded pebbles of quartz. There's a half-mile of boardwalk, over a tidal marsh, and that's where I'd startled the carp. There'd been heavy rains a few days ago -- the river had surged wild and was now settling back into itself, running flat and smooth. The water was still a foot or more higher than usual, pushing up over the beaches to nestle around the trees, nudging inland, ponding and pooling in the low areas.
I love how floods redefine a landscape. I love the transience of a flood, like seasons changing, how suddenly a forest will be immersed, a trail waist-deep in water. I love kayaking in floods, love the angry seethe of the river, love fighting up into the taut curling strain of a rapid, orange-electric with the fresh scour of dirt. The river's transformed, rocks and boulders buried by the water-rush. I love meeting the force of seething standing wave pulling and twisting at my prow like an angry fighter, sheen from the wave's curve tight and buzzing like a waspnest. When the river's calm, I imagine the slow fine scour of generations and millennia wearing a river valley into the landscape, but at times like now I think of the extremes, of disaster, when the river rises up 20 feet or more, rips at the rocks and tears away forests, raging strong like tsunamis, like hurricanes.
Rivers are shaped by floods, their boundaries inhabited by opportunists and survivors, by those adapted to disaster. Whatever aptness species develop for times of abundance, times of calmness are trumped by the extreme challenges of disasters - the 100-year flood, the asteroid strike, the long drought. That's when the core survivalist genes come forth, when the bruntness, the determination, the strength and perversity, the extremophilia of a population shine true.
The rocks are worn smooth here, despite the dense of their grain, their hard granite grit, from the strong smooth flowing disaster of the river, and the sand it carries, wearing into fine silt what once were mountains, high as the Himalayas. Usually the boardwalk crosses but one stream, the shifting tidal flow from an inland marsh abutted by reeds and swamp-flowers, dense tufts of grass that sink into wet acridity with a footstep. Today there's watersign sprawled across the boardwalk, showing the high-mark of the flood -- wave-left residue of leaves and seeds scrawled by receding waters. I've run here in the dark when the river overflowed the boardwalk, splashing steps across the mirror-reflect of the night sky and dark trees. The stars and moon rippled below me as the flow murmurred and glowed.
On this day, there were ankle-deep pools beside the boardwalk, sprawling finger-tendrils black-reflective against the canopy, channeling into the subtle indentations of land, splay-sprawled beneath the forest, nestling into the swamp-growth. The carp was half-immersed in the rippling reflections of forest mirrored-grey against the slow storm impending overhead, squirm-lashed wet within the swamp's lushness, bright abundance of a spring green as if bloom was its own flood, bright against the dark mud.
I thought about the carp, as I ran the rest of the loop. I wondered if it needed rescuing, if it was trapped or content. Running gives me space to think, the quick echo-beat of pace, the slow ebb of energy, the droning grit of will. The carp was in a pool that had no outlet, which would slowly drain to mud and then dried ground. Did it know that it was trapped in a dwindling puddle? Was it where it was supposed to be? Should I leave it to flail and die, or did it deserve to survive?
Carps are better adapted to desperation, to the boundaries, than most fish, can gasp-breathe in receding puddles, scrounging the silty abandons. I've been startled by their strangled gulps and slurps in the evening, in slack-water strandings, among wet-rotting branches and leaves and seeds, scavenging lazily, greedily. I've also watched them in the hot deep shade of the last pools left by a long summer drought, the riverbed parched, dried curling plates of cracked mud, when the landscape was bleached brown but for the sycamore trees, whose roots ran deep down, nestled into the same pools as the carp, which sworled up slowly for air, and then dropped down again like Leviathan.
"Was the flood a disaster, or an opportunity for this particular fish?", I thought to myself, as I dropped off the sand-gravel trail onto the boardwalk on my second loop. The carp was still in the same puddle, hadn't moved, but for the slow rise and fall of its breaths. I decided to try to put it in a better place. I wanted to carry it out and return it to the freedom of the river's open water. I stepped off the boardwalk, shoes sinking wet into the mud, and the fish break-lashed when I touched it.
I caught the carp like a predator, moved from nurturing respect to a predator's talons and grasp, reluctant to grab too hard, but still determinedly subjugatory, constrictive. As I walked the boardwalk towards open water the carp thrashed alien, strong and wet-slick, broke my hold and fell to the ground, bounced with the thud of wet meat as I winced. It twisted further and fell off the boardwalk back into the pool, rested there, half-immersed in the watery muck, glistening scales the size of quarters.
I stood and watched the fish for a minute, frustrated at my failure. On rare occasions, a description, a phrase, sometimes even a poem will come together in my mind that is so tautly apt, so resonant to a moment, or a scene, or an event, that it feels transcendent, and one arose unexpected now:
I saw a fish in a shallow pool
tried to rescue it
it fell into another pool
But that was insufficient, left out the muted rush of the flood, left out the carpness of the fish, left out how it fought instantly at my first touch, as if only then had it become aware of the threat of me, left out how it thrash-nosed forward, burrowing into the shallowing marsh, into sharp blades of swampgrass, left out its stubborn will to live or die on its own terms
Sometimes I wonder at my need for detail when I write, how I wade indulgently through descriptive landscapes, perverse with the telling as if the particular details -- the bush I'd turned right at, the moment I stopped and held my hands up to the sky as a light storm rushed over, not wet enough to damp the trail's dust, summer-soft and warm, the dissipate after sunset as the forest faded into dark. It all feels necessary, inherent. When I write, I want to capture those moments, describe them so accurately that the reader is there with me, experiencing them. And I know that's impossible, know that even if I were to write a perfect text, the words and phrases I use will trigger different associations and interpretations in each reader, will have significances other than my intentions.
Reality is infinite, and text so limited, imprecise and reductive, in comparison. And yet I'm compelled to write. I write because I believe that life isn't just an accumulated blur of images and experiences remembered from one moment or another, from one focus or another. Sometimes I feel that my descriptions are just an egotisitical attempt to catch something, to make meaningful my presence. I want to write, "I was here, and this happened, and I saw it happen.". But why does that matter? What's significant about my being at a particular place, at a particular time?
There is an inherent conflict between experiencing something, and describing it. The former is passive, receptive, the latter active, judging. This is in loose accordance with the Heisenberg Principle, which states that the act of observing an event, changes that event. It is the distinction between allowing something to happen, and recording it, defining it. Writing sets boundaries and limitations, chooses what's essential, what's right, and in so doing obliterates other potentialities, other interpretations. I was doing the same with this fish, trying to make things right, without knowing where the rightness was. I wanted to save the carp, even though I wasn't certain that it needed saving.
But maybe there isn't anything more accurate, more significant, than anything else, beyond what the swarm of humanity, the accumulation of minds and memories, pass on, one to another, in stories. Maybe what remains, what's significant, isn't so much what's told, but what's remembered from that constant and infinite rush of Now. Maybe it's the other side of storytelling, what the reader judges necessary, what details are caught/noticed/remembered, that resonates.
Or then again maybe it's the realities, the happenings, the fish that swim the rivers whether anyone notices or not, the precise pool and splay of water that their tails displace, occurring at the specific inclination of a full moon, that are what's relevant. Maybe the moments that I experience and try to write about, have as much random significance as all the things I never experience, or never notice, or forget, or fail to adequately describe when I write. I don't expect to ever resolve this question, to my satisfaction.
I left the fish where it was, decided to run another loop, and return. As I ran I wondered again about the rightness of rescuing this fish, whether in so doing I was stealing feasts from other entities, from the scavenger tumult that this carp's corpse would attracted, bones picked dry by ants and maggots, birds and raccoons. Had the carp chosen to be where it was, following paths of newness and opportunity? If I returned it to the river, would it turn around and force its way inland again? I imagined the flooded land from the carp's perspective as a new world, lush with possibility, imagined the bold seek and quest of a fish that had swum the same waters for years, imagined that it enjoyed the adventure and rarity of floods as much as I did. I wondered whether my appreciation was a vestigial instinct from a less-civilized time, when floods were dangerous opportunities, crux-moments of survival.
When I returned for the third time the carp was still where it had fallen. I stepped off the boardwalk and reached for it again, and it thrashed away at my touch. I caught it a second time, held it to my chest, walked 20 feet and then the fish broke from me again, thudded and flopped back into the swamp. It still wouldn't be able to swim free, was stranded without knowing it, couldn't see the ebbing limits of the pool it was trapped in. Had my rescue attempt had injured the fish, or was I its one chance for survival? Should I have tried harder, or less? Was I the only wrongness in the moment?
In the water, the fish was still, and for a moment I was also, listening to the river's water-flow. I breathed the wet lush of the flooded forest, trails of silt and carp-slick down my arms and chest. I looked back at the splashes and puddles across the trail left by our struggle, reminded of the strong squirm and will of the carp. I tried to imagine how it would remember the encounter, and realized that, beyond all the possible interpretations, we had undeniably met , had experienced each other, and would associate the memory with future floods.
I ran on.
Copyright 2008 - Kris Unger