If it didn’t get too rough downriver, all this water ought to help me because I won’t have to get out and portage the twelve-foot boat. All the places along the river I could rely on for food would be flooded out now.
Parking on Veterans Drive, I dragged the boat across the crushed gravel hike and bike trail down to the rowing center which, with the heavy flow of water, was creaking and about to burst away from shore.
I had to make several trips to the car and back. I almost forgot my $1,000 binoculars. Maggie stayed on the wide wooden dock, watching me go back and forth. As I was coming back over the trail for the last time, I heard her barking.
Across the river they stood. A long line of them as far as I could see in either direction. I stood with my hands on my hips and scanned the line of them, a hundred yards away from me. Between us, this mad river.
Toddlers to tweens stood among the trees. They waited to see me disembark, for once on the river, on the river I would stay.
I stowed a gym bag of clothes, my trombone case, an umbrella, a pot, and a couple of long-necked utility lighters in the storage compartment behind me and stuffed as much junk food, beef jerky and apples as I could everywhere else.
I sat in the boat, held my oar across my lap. I had to coax Maggie but she stepped into the front well gingerly. Her legs shook.
I shoved off. It felt wondrous to be fully buoyant. There’s nothing like that feeling, your body instantly recognizing the gestation sensation. The buoyancy forces you to take in and let out a huge, deep, cleansing breath. I felt a heavy pang of missing my father as I eased into the water’s rhythms. I was a pretty skilled and experienced paddler for my age, having gone out a ton with my dad when I was young. My dad was a total kayaker. A solo, lone wolf kind of guy. When I regurgitated this phrasing I’d picked up from Dad’s pontifications to my mom, she’d said, “Hah, he certainly was a lone wolf. That’s for sure.” I knew now she was talking about his affair. Affairs.
Since he moved away I’d paddled less. Not Martin’s thing—such the man’s man hunter of deer and fowl—and not soccer-Johnny’s thing either. But I still managed to get out a few mornings a season, on Sundays usually. My church.
The kids have been snooping my head. They know this comforts me. Gives me time to recount all this to you, dear reader. They want me to do that. I get a powerful sense of that.
Hold on, dear rea…they’re hummsing to me on that thought. So strong…guess I struck a nerve . . .
Once I got going, I knew I was too heavy. I couldn’t control the boat well and the water was hectic, water like I’d never known, unbound, moving on its own. Too heavy, but I couldn’t jettison the dog, nor the trombone, nor the food because it was all I had and this was hundreds of miles. I had four half-gallon bottles of water. I’d have to make it last. I was glad for the cooler weather.
They didn’t need to burn the old world down. Most of human population was near water. When the dams broke, when the Panama Canal went bust, the water would flow and change the coastlines. When earthquakes and hurricanes came, there’d be no cleanup. When the tsunamis moved in . . .
The world’s nuclear reactors. When would they start melting down? Were they already? How was I supposed to save the world’s children from these things? I didn’t know, but once I was a mile downriver and things stabilized, I felt good, like all would be solvable. Traveling does this. Provides perspective. I’ve come to believe that the beginning can happen, as Simon said, and I am its catalyst. I may know nothing about how to run a world, engineering and science, but I believe I can lead them. Kodie and I can do it.
Much later, when the time is right, we can try to understand Dr. Jespers’s theory. I locked his computer in the trunk of my police cruiser on Veteran’s Drive.19
I affixed this recorder to my jacket, Mr. E. The river has been high and easy to navigate. Most of this trip has been a dream. I’ve been floating and my mind has too and when they sing, they pull me toward them. As I’ve said before, I’ve lost hours of time feeling their song.
I don’t need to paddle much. The water’s been moving with the upstream influx. All I’ve had to do is dip my paddles to steer. I try to stay near the banks but they’ve overflowed so much that at times I’m afraid of getting caught up in drowned trees or an eddy.
The morning of, the children got a download, and I think I did too. The code has been buried within me until now. Now, on this river, it’s starting to boot me up into this new me.
I tell you this story when I’m on shore before sleep, after boiling water and feeding Maggie, but mostly when I’m in easygoing miles-long sections. Telling this story has helped me process it all. It has kept me company, kept me hopeful, and has enabled me to see the bigger picture. It has tracked my journey, my evolution from the sounds heard that dawn to now.
I feel as if I am actually communing with you. Talking to whoever may read this, in a future that is hopefully settled and sane, it makes me feel good when nothing else does. That’s as best I can say it.
But, really, I pretend. I pretend to have a conversation with someone else. There’s hope in the noises I make. Like whistling past a graveyard.
The river had its noises, moaned and whispered its way to the sea. Birds followed us overhead, their wingspan at full sail in these new winds.
“What do you think, killa? Should I begin way back in June when I was having those dreams while reading Lord of the Flies, writing The Late Bloomers, Johnny’s sleepwalking?”
Mags looked back at me, these being the first words I’d uttered since we veered away from the rowing center’s platform. The hinges holding the thing to the shore had screamed as we paddled clear. The shipwrecked kids in Lord of the Flies feared a beast. The naval officer says at the end, “Fun and games.” Then the boys all cry, smudging their war paint. They are saved. The end.
Maybe I’m the naval officer. I come by boat. When I arrive, Kodie and I will convince them that there is nothing to fear. The world has changed, but this beast is just a residual nightmare representing all that fear that has come with such sudden, jarring change. Change is their beast. I’ll help them.
I could tell you about this float trip, but that’s not what this story is about. And really, it’s just a river swollen over pastoral Texas, trees and hills, a few towns. The water is so high now, the towns on the river flooded. The tops of trees, rooftops, commercial signage sticking up just above the surface looking like eerie buoys.
Cruising by the Hyatt Lost Pines resort hotel, I could see right into the rooms of the third floor, the top. The kayak brushed against the metal patio bars. Maggie’s ears perked; she peered inside, too. Pillows floated. We’d gone there for a family trip about three years ago. Johnny and I played in the little water park. We had a good time, though I was always wary of looking like a tool in front the girls sunning themselves at the pool. Mom read a thick paperback (though she kept stashing it, I knew it was Fifty Shades). Martin would meet us for dinner each night all sunburned, beer-blitzed and talking loud with golfing buddies. She and Martin weren’t talking much.
Paddling under Highway 71 and later I-10, I looked up and thought my head clearance was questionable. Dark and unnerving and full of echoes.
Maggie keeps watch at night. I catch her copping Zs during the day, standing there swaying with her eyes closed. Sometimes she just curls up in the front well.
I ration my jerky. I drink my boiled water. I’m so tired I’m in a daze. They help me. Their singing helps me. I don’t see them, but they’re out there. I wish they’d talk to me. I’ll just keep talking to you.
I’ll share a memory. I haven’t and won’t go into a bunch of stuff from my life, mostly because it makes me too sad to think about. Though this is about my experience during these early days of the new world, here’s one far-back memory I like to hold on to.
It’s of me and Mom and Dad. This is when I’m young, like six, a
couple of years before they got divorced and Dad moved across the country. I guess I hold on to this because it’s the last time I can remember our threesome being happy together. Not saying there weren’t other times, just saying this is the strong one that popped into my head. The ground in the front yard was hard underneath the blanket we’d put down. This was in the first house I ever lived in, the one I came home from the hospital to, on Waterston, not far from Town Lake, which is what it was called back then.
Fourth of July, evening. We awaited the fireworks display which would shoot over the lake. We could see the whole thing from our front yard. Dad had a radio out there with us and the classical station played the patriotic marches, but what I remember is the 1812 Overture. We had finished eating grilled hot dogs, potato salad, and apple pie and we were just waiting for darkness to come.
Dad and Mom lay on the blanket facing each other propped on their elbows. I was drinking a Coke in a tall beveled glass bottle. They drank from glass bottles too. The ground was too hard for me so I marched around, knees up, chin up, officious look on my face, hamming it up for my folks. They laughed so hard that Mom’s forehead fell against Dad and she snorted. I just kept going and then they got up and fell in behind me. We marched all over the yard, then up the street still within earshot of the music, and back again.
It got dark and we’d forgotten ourselves. Then a big boom. We stood in the street in front of our house, and the thundering sound scared us and Dad picked me up, held Mom close. We looked up and there was the first firework, huge, in bloom and expanding. We could hear the faraway crowd cheering. Mom, Dad and me holding each other tight, the initial fear wearing off, standing in the street looking up.
Just as I finish having this memory, replaying it for you now…this is when I hear the children, thousands of them amassed in the dark, cheering, and it sounds so much like what my memory tells me I heard that July night eleven years ago that it makes me cry.
On the bank of this engorged river, it’s finally hitting me.
There’s a heaviness in my throat and in my chest and I know that this is what mourning feels like.
Maggie’s tied to me with a leash. She comes over to me as I cry and leans into me.
They kept cheering and cheering in a mad loop. Finally, I had cried myself out and then they stopped. But there’s no sleep.
Nope, I lie awake, talk to you, looking up at an array of stars like I’ve never seen, what the ancients saw when they looked up and now I understand the awe and fear they must have felt. With all of our lights and rationality, we humans lost our awe. At least the adults did.
As for the late bloomers like me, like Kodie, we’re stuck in the middle. And in the middle in which I am now stuck I am feeling pretty damned awed.
I lie here under this incredible smear of starshine and want to be awed some more, but I keep thinking of the webbing jumping between them as they stood in front of the tracks.
Out there they anticipate my every breath. They breathe with me, a sighing sound that starts to merge with the sounds of the ocean in my mind.
I feel their need.
Maggie smells it first. She’s been probing the air with her nose all morning, drawing in big drams of it. I know we’re getting close. When under the hot light of a south Texas morning I see the first fronds of a palm tree poking above the water’s surface and I smell the ocean’s salt, my pulse speeds up and stays there.
There’s been nothing since crossing under Route 59. Not a town, not a landmark, nothing but treetops and the tops of a few sturdy windmills and far-off gas station signs. I must’ve skirted Bay City east of the river and another, Buckeye, which was just west of the river. Maybe those things sticking up earlier was Buckeye.
I’m just steering. This river swells and swells as it nears the bay. When Maggie first smelled the scent of the sea, she’d whined a little, looked back at me a lot. I think she smells the sea’s vastness, the stink of what rots at the beach, and most of all—she smells them.
The smell was tamped by more light rain from the Gulf as I’d pulled off to camp for the night. I had to be pretty close to the Intracoastal Waterway which flowed laterally along the coast, located just south of the town of Matagorda.
Evening and now I’m hearing it. The thud and roar of the breakers. I needed sleep. Once I rounded the town of Matagorda, I’d have to paddle my way down through the brackish alluvium of the huge bay. This freaks me out because though I’ve always enjoyed kayaking, I’ve only paddled rivers and lakes. I don’t care to be paddling out at sea.
I can fight my way up the Intercoastal Waterway a bit after the town of Matagorda, I can cruise down its southern leg to the peninsula without having to cross that bay where the Colorado dumps into the west bay. But with the river so high, I’ll be paddling like a madman upstream for a mile, maybe more. If I can do it, it’ll be a nice float down there, just a few miles. The Lower Colorado River Authority ran a nature park down at the beach. That’s where I want to head.
After all, kids like parks.
Dawn. I dreamt the dream of sleep. Maggie stands on the riverbank facing the sea.
As we approach the new western edge of the town of Matagorda, I tell her, “We’re going to have to hump it northeast. Ready for that?” I slalom between the roofs and telephone poles of Matagorda. I now paddle past the top of a sign with a pirate parrot with an eye patch and a mug of beer curled in its wing—Matagordaville.
From here, dear reader, I’m documenting as I go. This story writes itself now. It’s crossed over into immediate reportage. No longer a memoir. Nope. Your intrepid reporter is finally at the place and time where the past and the future meet. Where the old world meets new world. Where the land meets sea. Still got this microphone clipped to my collar. Sorry if my speech is harder to hear and all that because I’ll be moving and talking. Choppier, less prosaic. All happening in real time. I’ll keep talking as things develop.
This is Kevin March, reporting. Back to you, Bob.
Okay, now I’m at that spot where if I go left, and it’s wanting to pull me that way… hold on. Okay, I see the other route. Gotta paddle hard for a while. Please hold.20
Okay—whew!—the waterways meet in some places here where I know they’re supposed to be separate. Looks like five hundred feet or so and I’ll be out of the either/or zone.
Straightforward float now. On my left to the east are the tops of palm trees and among them rooftops of what must have been river-to-the-sea homes. More telephone poles lining the flooded road.
All abruptly ends and now I cruise this channel. The sun rises ochre brass and carnation pink into a sky brushed with cloud wisps. I can’t see it yet, but the sea is there ahead of me. I’m here.
Looking for a place to pull off and walk to the Matagorda peninsula’s beach. It’s part of the long barrier island stretching for miles on the Texas coast. Hopefully, that nature park is still there. I think most of the Colorado’s floodwater veered off to the west. We’ll see.
Man, it’s beautiful out here, isn’t it Mags? The only thing is the smell. Can’t see them yet, all those whales that beached themselves the morning of.
There it is. Look at that, Maggie! Gulf of Mexico.
Looks like a dredger there in the mouth got turned over. The beach here—on the east side of the river to my left, right before the long seawall creating the channel out to the mouth—the sand is white. Lumpy sand dunes with tufts of grasses. I can see some buildings to my left. Must be the nature park. All these beautiful white sandhill cranes standing around. Hundreds. Their heads moving down to the sand, back up to look at me.
Running this kayak onto this beach before the seawall and I really do wonder if this has been a dream. It doesn’t seem real. None of it has. Not since the moment I heard those sounds. Part of why I had to record this story. Just to try to make it real for myself. It’s been like recording a dream I just had. Sometime
s that was literally true, huh?
I wouldn’t do it to you. Don’t you hate that? When you’ve invested your finite life’s time in a long book; or you’ve watched some movie and at the end it was all just a dream. The Wizard of Oz pulled it off, but other than that, it’s like, what the hell, are you kidding me?
Not a dream. This happened.
So, what is this? What’s happened to me, the human race? Dr. Jespers was on to something, and that something required the action of an intelligence we don’t understand. Mr. Fleming took a stab. I lean their way. I haven’t asked this so directly yet, and neither did my friends who were with me. We danced around it. Too big a question. You’re not going to get any facile exposition here, dear reader, no end-of-tale Scooby-Doo explanatory rehash. Sorry. I just don’t know what happened. Yet.
What will you make of it, I wonder? Will you liken it to Old Testament wrath, like Noah with his flood and couplings of kinds? A Rapture in which all adults are taken?
On the SAT it’d say or D, None of the above. Maybe that’s what I choose as I find myself walking this half mile across white sand to the seawall, weaving between dunes with my dog, these grasses grazing my legs, carrying my trombone case, my $1,000 binoculars, and my boat bag with the dregs of jerky and sunflower seeds, Professor Fleming’s letter, Dr. Jespers’s paper, and Kodie’s note.
If I’m wrong about everything, if you’ve all survived this, and you’ve listened up to now—because I don’t know what comes next—Mom, Dad, Martin, Mr. English…just know…I’m really glad I did this. It has kept me company, kept me whistling on this swollen river past all those graveyards.
I wish I could click my red sequined heels together three times, say there’s no place like home, and wake up and it’s game day and I’ve got some explaining to do but it’ll all work out.
Once you dream the dream of sleep, you don’t ever dream again, the dividing line between dream and reality erased. The line between the old world and new one gone.
My answer? Yep, it’s D, None of the above.
The Late Bloomer Page 31