When Will You Drink From Me Again?

I arrive at midnight, bursting from an angry cloud and startled like a child awakened by thunder. Illuminated in a sheet of lightening, I descend in a torrent through the woods and land in the creek with a heavy plop, surrounded by dancing jewels. My weight drives me down to the cool quiet depths where I linger all night, buffeted between the swift current above and the shifting creek bed below. Muffled echoes of the storm thump like distant harmonies. I blend formless into the river. At home.

At dawn, the sunlight cuts shafts through the trees and filters into the darkness. Its warmth raises me to mid-depth where the current, like a big sister, picks me up and draws me along. So swift. Yielding to it is like finding your heart’s rhythm and never yearning again. We course along.

At the sharp turn, a thick carpet of ferns stands proud on the bank. The river has sculpted a calm pool, shaded by cedar trees. After careening wildly from eddy to eddy around the bend, I catapult into the pool. It lies still, lingering like a chant, strewn with dainty stray leaves and a small branch turning as slowly as an hour hand. I am close enough that I could adhere to it, like a baby to a blanket, but I remain suspended beneath it, hovering and shifting for hours in the quiet pool.

Two fallen cedars, velveted with moss, overlap across the cavernous bottom. Like distant ancestors, they feed the river as the river once fed them. A brook trout appears from the decomposition, absorbs me and then gracefully swims to shallow waters, reaping my oxygen, and expelling me on its way. 

I submit to the current once again, replenished by the spring-fed streams that seep through the riverbanks. It’s a joyous jostle. We babble and bounce, the sun catching our splashes, the current twisting our flight, churning us under and tossing us up. It’s rowdy and then tranquil, resounding and then quiet, like a day in the life of a happy family. 

Deborah appears, paddling upstream atop the surge. She advances toward me with a measured cadence, while I, in free flow, hurl toward her. We meet where the river narrows. Her paddle scoops me up. Now I’m exposed—a single droplet pulled from the trillions of droplets in the mad river. Time stops. Deborah’s eyes glance at the blade of the paddle where I jiggle and sparkle, caught in the sun. She smiles. The scene is picture perfect: a woman paddling a small vessel up the river through the forested valley on a late spring day. The trout thrash in the marshes; the birds swoop, ringing out a hoot and holler. The flowing creek and the blowing breeze marry in a whoosh of soft white noise. It would be nice to be back with my siblings in the river, but this is fine. The paddle travels upward, and scarcely before it re-enters the river, I slide down its face. Plop! I’m swept once again into the current, off and away, leaving Deborah behind humming softly. 

Our flow cuts into the muddy banks fringed with tender grasses, exposing the roots of an ash tree. They cling symmetrically, spreading out on either side of the ash’s trunk like a Rorschach image, their tendrils weaving a living hieroglyph. We curl and filter through the root mesh, loosening the sandy soil, carrying it away grain by grain, chunk by chunk. At times, we collapse whole sections only to deposit them at curve’s end. Here today, gone tomorrow, the river-nation is forever changing. Sculpting the bank is our job, as is feeding the trees, shrubs and grasses that bind it. Maybe next year, the ash will be at the river bottom, maybe next month. 

The pace slackens so slightly the human eye would not perceive it, but even so, the current knows it will, in due course, widen to join the lake, a vaster world. 

In a clearing on a hill, two farm structures preside over uniform rows cut into the soil. Open fields lay in the sun where a teeming forest of hemlock, aspen, oak and hickory once stood. A tributary joins the river, carrying a warm effluent that meshes, like clouds of dye, with our pristine molecules. The discharge envelops us, pushing us downstream. 

Now that the river has widened and slowed, we move in a stealthy column, our former buoyant clamour a low monotone. I recognize a dull horror. Laden with the run-off, my siblings and I enter the lake. We blend with a steady influx of the worrying slurry. Some of the mix eases into the unassuming marsh; this finest of sieves filters the noxious soup. Being cleansed by the marsh is like falling in love—revitalizing and stupefying. But where the marsh meets the lake, our renewed gush confronts a thick ribbon of leachate. Our strength and purity fail, like children in an avalanche.

The day is warm for late spring and motor boats drone across the horizon. By mid-summer, blue-green algae blooms will form, robbing the lake of oxygen, strangling lake life and creating dead zones of rot. 

The sun’s waxing heat draws me, now a toxin-mule, upwards to the surface. One side of me makes contact with the scorching air. I heat up beneath the penetrating sun, and in an instant, I burst invisibly into the air. The sun draws me up, like a vacuum, into the cool sky, where I am transformed once again into clouds. Carried by the wind, we merge with others and, when full to bursting, will pour down. My journey is my destiny. 

It is cruel that we do not rain where we are needed. We will pummel the already saturated soil. We will carve out vein-like rivulets that fascinate children. But we will burrow chasms that swallow up roads and villages. Hills and shorelines are transformed in a single storm. Lethal soil flushes into lakes and rivers. Basements flood, while forests erupt in wildfires. Dull roots bake under cloudless skies. The cycle is out of whack.

I once got a lift on a paddle, sparkled in a babbling current and rested in the cool depths of the creek bed with the brook trout. You once cupped me in your hand and drank me in. We were like that then. 

But you changed. 

And so did I.

First published in Off Topic Publishing, January 2023.