Big water
I pedaled down to the river;
it wrinkled dark and green.
A kingfisher caught a fish like a silver comma
and flew into a sycamore tree.
-- Kevin Sheehan, excerpted from poem published in Slow Dancer (North American Edition), No. 29, Spring 1993. Full text here.
Where I'm from the water is vast. Salty. It's twisting miles of mucky rush, river bottom composed of leaves and mud. Children swim with sleek eels and glimmering fish, fight the pull of container ships in the channel. Traffic gets backed up on 50, on 213. Bridges fling cars over the C&D Canal, the Chesapeake Bay, the Bohemia River. Below, fishermen hook rockfish and net crabs.
We spent summer holidays at Ocean City, basted ourselves with tropical coconut oil before stretching out on blankets anchored to sand, begged Mom-mom for quarters for skeeball. Aunt Mildred, who wasn't really an aunt but some sort of foundling my grandmother's parents took in, had a trailer on Striker's Gut, a brackish strait that fed into the ocean. At least once every summer Bert, Lucy, and I looped chicken necks with string and dangled them in the water, a bushel basket waiting for our catch.
In college there was the house on Smith Island, 50 feet from the water. Kevin spent one foul humid summer building a gazebo and dock, my mother the sunburned helper. He'd grunt and hammer, a thin muscular man with an inexplicable pot belly which later revealed itself to be a sign of his swollen spleen, a symptom of myelofibrosis. When the dock was complete, I tethered a raft to the end of it, careful to keep my limbs out of the water where the jellyfish pulsated, ghosts with shaggy legs. At night, midges got through the screens and we yelped and growled, our hands throwing shadows by candlelight.
But most of my memories are of the Elk River, the walk down to the beach, tar staining the bottoms of my feet, the line of benches, somebody's grandparent always sitting there, cigarette shedding ash. Depending on the heat and the tide, I would either wade in until I couldn't stand the feel of the muck or dive and swim out to the raft. The houses were beach cottages built in the 1950s and '60s and the landscape rolled with cornfields and small tracts of woods. Everything was green or brown or white or black. My grandparent's house was cigarette smoke and mildew, creamy coffee, sawdust, the sound of the tractor cutting another swathe of grass.
I was Vi and Allen's granddaughter, willful, brown as a berry by September.
Image: Elk River, Hollywood Beach, Spring 2009 (picture taken on our trip to the East Coast last year).
Some of the names have been changed, some of the facts moved around.