Near Drowning (Lughnasa 2014)

Near Drowning (Lughnasa 2014) - a reading (on YouTube)


The last days of summer always catch me by surprise. The lazy, languid days I think will never end. They always do. While I’m dozing, life reaches out and grasps my neck. Fully awake, I know nothing goes on forever. Summer is no exception.

It happened between Lughnasa and the equinox, one of the last days our family went to the lake. The memory has the feel of late summer. The air had a cooler edge. It was evening, a time we usually were packing up to go. The pines had taken on a dark quality as their needles were touched by twilight. Or maybe I’m just remembering the shadow that fell across me.

It’s funny, the details I remember and those I don’t. I remember the light and time, but the month and year are no more than an impression. I know I was under ten.

I was swimming in the shallows, practicing holding my breath. I was alone in the water. Usually, the swimming area was full of people, mostly kids like me. By late afternoon it thinned out. The lake closed at dusk. My mother and father had retreated to a picnic shelter behind a palmetto break with another family, out of sight. Everyone else had headed home.

I’ve known how to swim as long as I can remember. I love the water. I love the freedom that it brings. Submerge and the world above becomes muffled and remote. Suspended in crystalline blue, everything turns peaceful.

I don’t know how she came to be near. She asked what I was doing. I bragged that I was seeing how long I could hold my breath. I bet you can’t hold it for minute. I said I could. Prove it, she said.

My instincts whispered that I shouldn’t trust her. She’d been unpredictable for as long as I could remember. She must have sensed my unease. Show me where the water meets the shore. Nothing can happen here. I’ll stand back and won’t move. I promise.

I eyed her sidelong but paddled up to where she could see. I took a deep breath and plunged my face below the surface and started counting, thinking I was safe.

Before I hit ten, her hands were on my neck. I thrashed and twisted to get away. Her elbows locked, the full weight of her body behind them. She was two years older and probably outweighed me by a third.

My struggles turned to desperation. My lungs began to burn. I grew weaker while she grew stronger. I knew this wasn’t a childhood game. I knew I would never force my way from beneath her hands. A little voice told me, she’s always been too much older, too much bigger, too much stronger. You’ll never win. I didn’t listen.

I don’t know how long she held me under. Time becomes malleable when you think you’re fighting for your life. In the pool, I used to swim laps underwater. I could hold my breath for minutes without a problem. Struggling and panicked, I doubt I could have lasted that long. As I began to tire, that same voice whispered: play dead. Make her believe. It’s your only chance.

This time, I listened. I forced myself to relax and stop struggling. I made my arms and legs go limp. I slowly blew out the last of my precious, life-sustaining air. I was a method actor auditioning for the role of a lifetime.

For a very long count I didn’t move, didn’t think, didn’t so much as tense, just floated, my life within her hands. The seconds became ductile and drawn out. I felt a twitch then a slight easing but thought it was a trap. So I held my water. An eternity later, I felt her relax, as if she’d confirmed the job was finally done.

I took my opportunity and burst up from the water with the last of my reserves. I gasped a huge breath as soon as I broke the surface in case I was forced down again. I needn’t have bothered. I can still see the expression of shocked surprise on her face as I broke free. She no longer held me or controlled me. And she would never get me back.

I sometimes wonder why I tell this story. Maybe I just need to ask the question that still lingers below the surface. The one we all asked when faced with the unexpected. Why?

Only two of us know what really happened that day. Only one of us knows why. I didn’t think about that question as it was happening. I was intent on my survival. But I often think about it now. Not why we were there or what might have been different if we hadn’t been. Had it not been that day, it would have been another. Had she been older, she might not have been so easily fooled. I might not have survived. I’m still not sure exactly why I did. Cleverness? More likely luck.

Our youngest cat, Nyala, sometimes wakes up crying. It’s begun happening more frequently this summer. If I’m not near, she cries out like a distressed kitten, not moving until I call her or find her. When I do, she comes running then curls up on my lap purring before she drifts back to sleep. I don’t know why she does it. Unlike our other cat, I know her entire history, know she was orphaned when she was five days old, know she and her brother spent their first two months fostered by a loving family who cared for her so much they almost didn’t give her up. They kept the pair of them together in their guest house to shelter them from their young kids and other cats.

Maybe that’s what she remembers. Maybe she just gets scared at waking up all alone, thinking her family has abandoned her. Or maybe not. It’s hard to know.

Perhaps there are no answers to either of our questions. Perhaps the only reason for that incident was to allow me to reach out and console another, to recognize her pain even if she can’t communicate the why. Perhaps the only meaning in this life comes from sharing warmth and comfort at the bounty of the berry harvest even as we each awake from near drowning in our own white prison. And, perhaps, as the bright light of summer slowly fades to fall, that is just enough.

© 2014 Edward P. Morgan III

The Margins

When I set down the phone yesterday, I remembered the place where I grew up. Not the house where I lived, but the places I went to escape it. As a kid, I spent as much time as I could somewhere else, exploring the wilds along the fringes of suburbia. Most of that land was overgrown pasture broken by a grid of windbreaks on some sides, drainage ditches and dirt roads on others. A patchwork of weed-choked fields interspersed with palmetto brakes and pine scrub forest, all laced with trails worn by the passage of many small, quick feet.

In that world, the children were the natives, the adults the invading Puritan settlers. We blended into our surroundings and watched their continually encroaching world from behind the borders of our childhoods. We were seen only in flashes, heard only in laughter before disappearing deep into our tribal territories where we ran wild and half naked in the sun. We divided ourselves into clans based on neighborhoods whose boundaries in the margins ebbed and flowed with the tides of our interests, ages, explorations and numbers.

Ours was a bright world bordered by darkness. Bright long and wild grasses, bright, hot sand baking in the bright Florida sun, bright green palmetto fronds, all fenced by double rows of dark, Australian pines that whispered in the wind like Celtic spirits singing a lament in a Grimm Germanic forest, and tannic waters that flowed just above stagnation within moat-like ditches patrolled by the alligators and moccasins we thought would defend our primeval world from mass incursion. In winter we kept to the marches close to home, tunneling through seemingly impenetrable saw grass to hollow out natural shelters from the wind. In the summer, we dug like wild dogs, like angry gnomes carving out chambers with sandy gray walls that we would roof with plywood to disguise. The cool pits served as our refuge from both prying eyes and the blazing sun. Each spring and fall, we felled small trees to bridge the ditches after our parent-settlers had cleared them away. We kept our crossings half submerged to conceal them, knowing the Puritan giants didn't like to wet their feet. Beyond the bridges, we built forts and temporary shelters, migrating from isolation to isolation as our gathering places were discovered.

Alone or small bands, we crossed that bridge and explored the windbreaks farther and farther back to the where an earlier generation had sunk a standpipe to free an artesian well rich with sulfur and other elements that trailed in yellow and white streamers flowing along the dark and rotting detritus that had settled from the trees. The windbreaks ran for miles, broken by twin-rutted roads with grass between their tracks and weeds climbing along their shallow embankments. Deeper to the east were the berms, a perfect backstop to perfect our aim with BB guns or the occasional .22 caliber rifle. Some were topped with scrub oak sheltering high and narrow trails rife with rumors of arrowheads and Indian mounds, signs of our adopted brethren.

In isolated stands of woods between neighborhoods along the now-paved back roads and trails we took to school, we found older, abandoned settlements. Rusted barbed-wire lay coiled between rotting posts that once fenced primitive, three-sided barns that had sheltered horses just a few years before. We would seek refuge beneath their corrugated roofs when they rang with the rain that brought out the faint traces of horseflesh still embedded in their dark and deeply-grained posts. We scouted two-story homesteads with collapsed roofs and open walls, complete with moldy furnishings and housewares, the artifacts of failed colonies that gave us hope that a war against progress could be won. To us they marked a high-tide, the wrack line of an unsuccessful invasion into our wilds at some distant point in history. We didn't realize that the nearby orchard of houses were heavy with fruit ready to drop and spread their seed through our demesne.

I haunted that under-populated territory more than most. I spent my evenings, weekends and summers there, sometimes in the company of friends or rivals but more often alone with a book, a gun and some food so I wouldn't have to return home until dinner or dark. The woods and wilds were my escape from the more dangerous, common world safely hidden from view. The margins became my sanctuary.

Now that sanctuary is gone, built up and paved over. Year by year, the bulldozers have uprooted the trees we used to climb, leveled the ditches we traversed and filled in the abandoned quarry where we used to swim. They have pushed the border beyond the interstate into the last stronghold of original homesteaded pasture being sold off by the parcel, places our feet never ran unless they were prepared to dodge rock-salt or birdshot while being pursued by galloping hooves. Soon, that border will migrate to the river dividing one county from the next until the margins, squeezed from both east and west, shoot up along its banks toward the urban sprawl astride its outlet to the sea.

I don't begrudge these new settlers their homes. Progress marches onward whether I approve or not. New families need new places to live. Our families were once the intruders on someone else's sacred childhood. But when events in my life stir unpleasant memories like decay from the bottom of a still pool, I wish I could escape to the solitude of the margins, and the sanctuary they provided.


© 2008 Edward P. Morgan III