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At the Seam
by Helen Paloge I’ve never been at this particular spot by the river on Greendale Road, or in this relation to the river flow. Downstream is to my right instead of left. It’s a bit disorienting, like brushing your teeth with the wrong hand or putting your bra on by hooking it in the back instead of the front. Nothing is familiar. A disconnect is necessary from time to time. The water here is louder where it falls over a succession of rocky steps on one side of me. Yet it's also softer, slurpier where it slides mellowly from the shade into the sun on the other side over rounder, smoother stones. I sit at the seam. The trees bend more disheveled into the water upstream. Some have fallen first under the weight of winter snow and then in the subsequent summer storms. Some of these trees are twisted, thin and frail, like men who’ve grown sickly old and have lain down to die. Many trees have broken limbs that will have to go unmended, hanging at crazy angles painful for the eye to see. Some have branches molded by the wind into poses too human for comfort – dancing maidens, embracing mothers, crestfallen lovers. The banks seem to be folding under into the river, and the trees at water’s edge lean precariously before they will fall in. Across the way, the sun speckles the forest floor and makes the tree trunks light up like doors to a mysterious world, teasing, inviting and then gone as clouds above extinguish the light. I would want to sit over there, perhaps, rather than here. But if I were there, I’d be looking at where I am now and longing to be part of this. I am afraid of the day I’ll no longer feel that way, becoming so complacent about where I am that nothing else will call to me or make me want. I know the comfort it would bring, so long as I gave in to it, to simply be whatever I was, in the moment, entirely. But the stasis it implies, the death of movement, of dynamism, of change … . It’s the log lying heavily across the bank, perched on a moss-covered rock that stopped its fall into the river. Lying there long enough, other trees will fall on top of it till it will no longer be a tree. I see a path light up between the trees and am sure, sitting on my plastic chair this side of the water, that I’d follow that bright yellow road to wherever it took me, along the river, through the trees, deep into the forest until the path, and everything around it, turned grey, then dark green, and finally black. In the thick of night, I’d have to close my eyes and try to sleep, not so much from tiredness as to avoid the blinding darkness. I am not afraid of monsters coming out at night – though there would be all manner of creatures sniffing around me in the dense woods – but of the perpetual, unmitigated darkness both behind closed eyelids and in the world around me when I open them. I think if I made it through the dark into the light of day in the forest, we’d be bonded forever. It takes that – grappling with the bogey man, the unfamiliar, and not turning away. But I sit here on my plastic chair. Today’s adventure is no more than sitting on the right rather than the left of the river. I’m not about to disappear into the woods, not about to take the trouble or face the discomfort, let alone the fear. I am getting closer, am I not, to the inertia of acceptance, the placidity of living in the here and now, the thrillessness of contentment, the log perched in waiting for nothing more than more of the same, the stillness to which these waters run. |
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