6
“Has she sent other people to see you? Like me?” I asked.
“So far only a couple,” she said. “They’s married. They lived acrost the ocean somewheres.”
The old man really gets around. Years sitting on a mountaintop, interspersed with voyaging to the far corners of the planet. There’s a life.
“But they’s livin’ here, now,” she continued. “Not right here in town, I mean in this country. They came an’ see me again, too. Oh, we talked a lot! Like almos’ all night, I barely made it to school nex’ day!”
Another thing I was learning from the old man: when to switch gears, let the words and actions veer to where they need to go. A change washed through me, new thoughts came:
Stop stalling.
She is a child, but you are not here to bandy in kid-excitement. You know why the old man sent you here. You have all the clues you need.
You have one short visit, perhaps only a few more moments, not years of counseling sessions.
Go right to it.
It will work, because of who you are and who she is.
Gently.
“Is it just you and your mom?” I asked.
Now it was her time to stall. She looked around her, then at me, around, at me.
“Uh huh,” she said, almost resignedly.
Picked up a stick and absently tapped a rock with it. She knows where this is heading. I think she’s somehow trusting me to walk through it with her, but briefly and with minimal sentiment.
“And how is it?” I asked.
“She feed me. I got a mattress. Got clothes.”
I could not bring myself to ask ‘And love? Affection? Fun?’ Her answer was all too clear, and I think to mention those words would have sent a stab through her. Some things you survive better by simply not saying them, out loud or even in your own mind. Until later.
But I needed to continue. I was here to do something for her, and I didn’t have enough information to know what that was, yet.
“And your father?”
She looked away. This was the thing.
“He in prison.”
For the first time, I could feel her confidence, her life, draining away a little. But, brave girl, she stayed with me, stayed sitting there, still only twenty feet away.
“For long?”
“Uh huh. Years, I guess.”
“What did he do?”
“He jus’ do some bad stuff.”
She shrank a little more into herself. I had a terrible feeling in my stomach.
“To you?” I asked quietly.
“…Uh huh,” she said, in the smallest voice I could barely hear from my rock.
A couple words, Uh huh, substitute for a dump truck of explanations.
Move on.
Start giving.
Start healing.
“Do you know why the old woman is sending people to you?” I asked.
“She say, if I cain’t leave here ‘till I older, then she send the world to me instead. She say, come to the river much as I can, it save me, and she send only the best people to visit me at the river.”
“How did she say the river would save you?”
“Don’ know. She just say to visit here lots, watch the river, listen, play. She say, when I understand the river, it save me.”
The old man gave her her own ‘pebble to look inside’.
“And the rocks? Did you write all those names?” I asked.
“Figured I need lotsa help watchin’ and listenin’, so I name rocks. Kinda like a audience all ‘long the shore, watch an’ listen even when I not here.”
She peered at me, seriously wanting an answer but also afraid to hear it: “You think I goin’ crazy, doin’ stuff like that?”
I know she needs a stark, unadorned, honest adult answer, to help her grow straight inside.
“Everything you’re doing… sounds perfect to me. And, next to the old woman, I’ve enjoyed meeting you more than anyone else in my life, ever. So, I don’t know about crazy for you or me, but whatever we are, I think both of us will turn out… really good.”
I realized how much I meant and believed that, for her. So I repeated it, with something stronger in my voice:
“I think you will turn out very good.”
She jumped up suddenly, a quick smile radiating and the haunted edges magically gone. But only for a moment, and then the shadow crept in again and held her to her spot. Trusting in someone sent by her old woman, but also not trusting, conflicted because I’m a grown man, and a stranger. Wanting to believe the good said about her, but not trusting to believe it, either. Wanting to approach, wanting closeness, but not trusting me, either.
“Gots to go, now,” she said. “Dark soon.”
Good girl. She’ll protect herself, until she learns the situations where she no longer has to. Tragic lesson… but good lesson.
“I expect you do this all the time, so you don’t need me to wander behind and see you home safely?” I offered.
“Not ‘less you can run. I be home in no time.”
“No chance of me running,” I smiled. Then I acted on a hunch: “Before you go, can you tell me the name of your favorite rock?”
She laughed—like a kid, for the first time—and told me the name. Two names, actually, a man and a woman, foreign first names.
I said, “Okay, I will find that rock. I won’t be here if you come after school tomorrow, but I wanted to leave a little present for you. I’ll put it under that rock, okay?”
She stood for a moment, facing me. Still twenty feet away.
“You comin’ ‘gain sometime?” she asked.
Not trusting, but leaving a door open for hope.
“I’d like to. If you don’t mind, then I’ll make it a promise.”
A beat, while she weighed things.
“Okay,” she said.
Then she whirled lightly and was swallowed like a sylph into the trees.
7
Exhausted after the long day, but not yet feeling like setting up camp, I left my gear on the big rock, unfurled my sleeping bag, and with it hopped a few more boulders down to the water’s edge. On another large, flattish boulder rising only a couple inches above the water, I spread out the sleeping bag and lay down on it, curled up sideways. The river flowed past, a few inches from my eyes. I rested my hand on the boulder’s edge, the cool water trailing around my dipped fingers.
A half hour of river flowed by, a huge lake’s worth of water. My tired tenseness washed out of me and flowed with it. My breathing stilled beside it, and all was quiet except the unspeakable sound of the river’s flow. The treetops behind me rustled as a high-up breeze shook hands with their leaves. In her nest somewhere in one of them a robin trilled her evening song of accompaniment to the lost daylight. Long shadows on the boulders became dim, and the world merged into dark gray.
I watched a moon, I guess our moon, slowly rise above the tiny treeline far across. My new reality became the river’s flow, past my feet, past my body, and disappearing beyond my head. I lay there, completely still, almost ceasing to exist, only the river moving.
No answer came.
I do not know what this step of my journey is about. I do not know what I am supposed to learn through meeting this little girl. I am so tired, and this rock has become very hard below even my padded sleeping bag.
With my flashlight and the moonlight to guide me, I carried and dragged my gear back through the trail to the small clearing between the trees and the levee. I tiredly but swiftly pitched my tent and threw my gear and sleeping bag inside it, then somehow stumbled myself into bed, all by sheer force of having repeated those motions so often before.
A few deepest breaths, a body surrendering to the contours of the ground. In maybe two minutes, or was it one, I was—
8
Dawn dimly lights my tent.
An engine has just awoken me. It sounds like a truck driving up the far side of the levee, then down the ramp to my side. Hundreds of miles of levee, five in the morning, in a hidden spot where no one can see my tent… and there’s a vehicle arriving right where I’m camped?
I hear it stop maybe forty feet away in this little clearing, and two doors open and shut. Male voices talk quietly. Inside my dome tent I’ve sat up, crouching, knife in hand—by habit I sleep with it under my sleeping bag, near my head. Not that a knife would do me any good if, say, they start pumping at my tent with shotguns.
But then I hear twigs crackling as footsteps plod the path through the trees, walking toward the river. So I haul my bones outside and stand in the dim new morning, have a pee, splash some bottled water on my face and hands, drink.
Nearby is a pickup truck, newish but not one of the brothers’ trucks from yesterday. Some guys fishing at dawn, maybe? Coincidence they happened to pick the one levee ramp I’m camped beside, or coincidence I camped beside their favorite fishing spot?
Taking along my water and an apple, I walk the path through the trees and emerge atop the shore of boulders, to see a most incredible early morning vision:
The water’s surface, all mile-and-a-half across and as far as I can see upriver and downriver, is hidden below a soft white mist. The mist itself is floating slowly along, hitchhiking the river current’s breeze; the flowing mist is now the river.
Two men are standing on rocks near the water’s edge, a ways downriver from me. One is dressed pure cowboy: boots and jeans, checkered shirt, hat and mustache. The other man, maybe fifty, is in pure white, just like on some TV show: white boots, all-white three-piece suit, white Stetson, everything pressed and spotless. They know I’m standing here, though neither man glances in my direction. But I’m getting used to that.
A massive river barge, almost the size of an ocean tanker, is looming out of the mist, looking like it’s floating ghostly upon it, pushing upriver toward us. Hundreds of feet long, the barge is one huge, flat, long body of dark metal, with the white pilot house sticking up far aft. The sharp wedge-shaped front of the barge is slowly, carefully, angling sideways toward the shore.
Toward our shore, right here. Not a harbor or dock in sight, just the boulders, the men, and me.
I hop down a few boulders, not nearer the men but nearer the water, to experience this more full-on. The front corner of the barge actually touches the boulders by the men, with a gentle metal-to-rock grating sound, while the butt end—I mean, aft—is still far, far out on the river, diagonally. I look up as a deckhand’s face appears over the bow’s rim, and he lowers a long ladder down to the men on shore.
The man in white climbs up the ladder deftly, without any goodbye to the cowboy or any greeting to the deckhand, like this has been done a thousand times before. As he walks out of sight beyond the rim, his cowboy partner has already hopped the boulders back up to the trees behind me and is disappearing down the trail.
I’m still standing here, chomping my apple, as I hear the truck leave. The bearded, grizzled-looking deckhand, his ladder almost up, makes eye contact with me, the only one to do so. A quick smile and nod, with a cigarette in his mouth. I smile in return and call out, “How’s a guy get a ride on that?”
“Hop on!” he called back, hesitating with the ladder, ready to lower it again. “Take you up to the next city. You want?”
There’s still a magnificent happening in the civilized world, where they don’t ask you for money or to fill out paperwork and life-risk waivers? Just ‘Hop on’, instantly, and no worries about insurance or the boss?
“My tent and gear are back there,” I replied up to him. “Take me five minutes to scramble it and get back. You wait?”
I knew they wouldn’t wait. I knew I wouldn’t abandon my gear to jump on board for this adventure. And I knew I wasn’t going anywhere just yet, even if they would wait. I had something to do here. Still, fun to ask, fun to imagine the adventure out loud. Maybe back when I was nineteen…
“Can’t wait. We’re off,” he called, hauling the last of the ladder aboard and giving a quick hand signal to an unseen someone far back in the pilot house.
I waved, the deckhand gestured in return, then walked back out of sight himself. The bow grated and edged away from the rocks, then swung out into the river mist. Deep rumbling engines churned loudly and the barge once again pushed itself against the mighty river current.
I sat on the boulders, watching it become smaller, looking as if it were floating weightlessly upriver upon clouds. Another tanker-sized barge passed it nearer the far shore, looking like a toy boat in the distance, heading downriver.
A fun, missed adventure. But my path is here today, not chasing fun adventures.
Soon I was alone with the rocks and trees and mist.
9
Why did the old man send the girl here?
Not to fish, or swim, or play, not simply because it’s a pretty river or because it’s water. His intent runs deeper, always. Some divine orchestration.
Why did he send me here, such a long distance to travel, what is this next step in my path, after nothingness? Just as he sent me ‘inside the pebble’ to discover first-hand a simple essence of existence, so must he also have wanted me to discover another essence of existence, through this present step in my journey.
And not just another truth… the next truth, in a very particular order. What is the next thing? What comes after nothingness, what exists in nothingness?
It must be obvious, simple, not a riddle, since he knows I do not want to meditate over ‘spiritual riddles’ for days or weeks. So what is the common denominator to my long journey here, to the girl and to her river?
“Movement,” I said aloud over the mist.
He wanted me to be in motion, he wanted her to stay in motion, and for us both to be near something that signified pure motion.
If she just sat around at home, stagnant in her toxic situation, she would fester, grow bent and broken inside, die inside.
He wanted her moving. He wanted me moving.
He wanted her outside, cleansed daily by the river breeze, the rustling trees, the living water, the bustling creatures. Always something moving inside her, from watching the creator move in myriad ways. Always physically moving, running back and forth, hopping rocks. Always her mind moving, inventing, out here where she has openness to think, to intimately express, to write made-up names artistically on these boulder-canvasses that are free and always here for her.
He wanted to keep her in motion, truly living.
So she wouldn’t grow up to become like another mother I saw, sitting smoking on a broken porch, gazing over a desolate land and silently asking it why the good parts of the universe have deserted her.
10
The morning is heating up. With the sun shining directly on the river now, the mist rises and dissolves. I can see the water again, the landscape doesn’t look ethereal and floating anymore. Birds have finished their sunrise chirping and have moved on to their morning flying and chores.
It is time for me to do mine.
In my notepad, I write for a couple hours. I write all the things I can think of that a loving father should say to his seven-year-old daughter, all the things I can think of that a caring mother would say. All the things I felt through my being with her for our short visit, and a few things a caring counsellor might say to a forgotten and badly-used child.
I wrote enough that, hopefully after reading it a hundred times over the years, she might believe it about herself. Might even grow to know it for certain.
I left her most of the cash I had with me, not a lot but enough to help her first step of escape into some later change of life if she needed to. I hoped she’d use it for such, not to buy candy now and more adult addictions later.
I told her I loved her very much. She won’t understand that now but I said it because someone needs to and because it is true. And maybe just maybe those five written words from a stranger might help stop the razor from touching her wrist ten years from now.
I sealed these in two doubled-up plastic bags, explored until I found her ‘favorite rock’ with the two unusual first names on it, and stashed the package beneath it through the cracks.
Then I sat and wrote for myself, about my second step in this journey.
Finished, I stood on my rock for a while. Loath to return to the dusty highway, yet also with a feeling of rightness in walking the hot land again, toward another two strangers who I know will not need introductions or greetings but will simply start talking with me.
I gaze out over the river of motion.
The river is strong, endlessly strong.
And what did I write for myself?
(That writing coming soon)
For a deeper understanding of this part of your journey, read the SOMETHINGNESS COMMENTARIES here (coming soon)
Journey continues into Chapter 3: SAMENESS