Deep River Burning

by Donelle Dreese

  Even with her education, she felt ill-prepared to work at a coastal wildlife sanctuary. In college and through her own initiative, she mostly studied geology, coal, river biology, water and air pollution caused by coal production, species native to eastern Pennsylvania, and ecosystems of the mid-Atlantic. Other than the few books she had been reading recently, she knew very little about the ecology of the southeast coast.

  The next morning, when Denver woke up early to walk the beach looking for shells, she saw Father Allen sitting on the beach deep in prayer. What does a priest say in his prayers? What does he say as he strives to experience oneness with God? Does he feel something others do not? When she looked out at the vast expanse of the Atlantic, she thought that God must be here, if he (or she) is anywhere.

  She walked up the beach combing the shoreline looking at the space around her feet and the tidewater flushing in and pulling back. She looked for shells, but she rarely ever kept them if she found one. When she scanned her eyes over the rippling foam, she was looking for anything, not just shells, seaglass maybe, and once she found a seahorse, motionless and limp lying on a tuft of sand with the perfect curve of its back still intact. She loved seahorses, the way their movement through water is a slow, delicate dance and the only way they can escape the claws of their predators is to hide. She guessed that the seahorse she found had been washed ashore by a storm that moved over the beach a few days earlier.

  No two seahorses are alike, and when they prance about, their curved bodies gracefully glide in and out of the dark sea grass beds and coral reefs. This seahorse was female because it didn’t have the pouch in the front of its body. She took the seahorse back to the sanctuary and placed it by the window on a piece of wax paper. After a while, the seahorse became stiff and prickly as its finned body dried and petrified. She wanted to preserve it as a reminder to her of all the things in this world that are extraordinary.

  She went back outside and sat down for a while on the beach to look around. The sun still hadn’t risen so it was chilly, and although the damp salt wind could be harsh at times, this morning it was a tender caress on the skin. Father Allen had seen her and slowly walked up the beach to where she was sitting. While some aspects of him didn’t seem priestly to her, from whatever distorted image she had accumulated of priests up until then, his gait had all the markings of holiness, the very movement of peace. Nothing about him was awkward or clumsy or fierce. Whatever struggles he fought, he certainly mastered the art of calm, or perhaps it was the sea that made him that way.

  “Good morning, Denver,” he said cheerfully.

  “Good morning!” Denver responded smiling. He had a way of making everyone feel good around him.

  “What brings you out here so early?”

  “I’m looking for treasures, maybe,” she said looking out at the sea.

  “Have you found any?”

  “Not yet, but I’m hot on the trail of something.”

  “The sea has many treasures to offer,” he said as he sat down next to her.

  They both sat for a moment thinking and watching a bird dive into the water and seconds later, rising with a fish in its mouth.

  “Is this where you find God?” Denver asked inquisitively.

  “God is everywhere, Denver, and in all things.”

  It was one of those statements that however true, sounded so painfully cliché that it bounced off a road block when it entered her ear.

  “I don’t understand how you can say that when you know there is so much evil in the world, and so much pain and suffering, and not all places are beautiful and peaceful like Isabel Beach. Where is God when a bird is strangled by a plastic ring from a six-pack? Where is God when there is an oil spill? Where was God when my parents were brutally murdered in their sleep? Where was God in Adena?”

  “I have no explanation for what happened in Adena, but I can suggest that God does not think of death the way we do. If God sees all souls then there is no death, only movement and transition. It is a gift that we have been sent to experience being human, but if we remember that everything, in its essence is far, far greater than the physical world, then perhaps we can ease our suffering, and the suffering of others.”

  She looked down at the sand. She felt a heaviness in her chest. Father Allen was lying on his side propped up on one arm. She watched his other hand filtering grains of sand.

  “But . . . I am the physical world,” she said. “This is my body. This is the Earth I’m sitting on. When I fall hard against it, it hurts.”

  “No, Denver. You are not your body. Ultimately, you are not even your mind. We don’t know who we are because our minds can barely conceive of it. But when we attach ourselves to our physical and even psychological worlds, we further ourselves from God and suffer much for it. These worlds are not the reality, not the essence. They are distractions . . . distractions through which standards and expectations are formed by humanity, and then finally judgments. There is a Hindu word, Maya, it refers to this illusory realm, this chaos, which binds humanity to the suffering. If we identify ourselves with Maya, then we attach ourselves to these judgments.”

  While she listened, she traced patterns in the sand with a piece of shell.

  “Sometimes I think of the human experience as being similar to watching a movie,” he continued. “We are there and we feel it, in fact we get so entranced by it, so engrossed in its beauty and suggestions, that we forget ourselves, sometimes entirely, we step into the movie . . . but all the while, still sitting in the seat, patiently waiting, is the true self. This true self does many things to get our attention. It will make us sick. It will create conflict in our relationships with others. It watches us as we try to make ourselves whole by turning to everything else, to money, to work, to alcohol, to another person . . . to a place. This is the part of us that we have abandoned because the movie is so seductive and overwhelming. But this part of us is in pain and we will suffer until we find our way back to it.”

  “How can someone step out of this movie? Do I have to die physically to find my true self?”

  “I’m not sure death of the physical body even guarantees it. We are all on this journey together . . . this same journey for the same thing, and we are all here to help one another get there whether we realize it or not. Some people are closer than others . . . and I think it has less to do with age of the body and mind and more to do with the age of the soul. You are here to serve some divine purpose, Denver, and to continue on with your own journey, if not for God, then for yourself. You will teach others, and others will teach you. But never forget about that part of you that is watching, that part of you that is hurting. It knows the way.”

  “There’s no way out of it. Is there?”

  “Out of what?” He asked sitting up.

  “Out of the cycle. I mean, if God saves, then what kills? Satan? I don’t believe in Satan, Father, so how can I believe in God? The two are mutually dependent on one another. How can God work his miracles without evil? And I wonder sometimes if good and evil don’t come from the same place. If so, isn’t God just as much to blame for the bad things that happen as well as the good?

  “I know you don’t see this now, but all things happen for a reason. God’s will doesn’t always correspond with our own.”

  “And so what are we supposed to do?”

  He stared out to sea and then he knelt down next to Denver and gently placed a handful of sand in a pile in front of him. He picked up a fistful of sand and watched it drain through his fingers.

  “Let go.”

  The wind picked up as the sun had risen, and a swift breeze from the sea blew the sand around them into the air in a swirl. He stood up and brushed the sand from his clothes. “I must be getting back to the sanctuary now. We are having some guests from the church over for breakfast. Should we expect you?”

&n
bsp; “Yes. I will be along in a minute.”

  He waved and walked away. The sound of him was lost in the sounds of the sea, and his figure, circled by a small butterfly, was small in the distance. She watched the butterfly. What could be more disparaging than a butterfly, a Monarch maybe, lost at sea, with wings flouncing through the marine air like tissue paper over an infinite stratum, a gray solid plane rippled and deadly. A butterfly swept out to the Atlantic by a violent storm. It would have been on its way to Mexico perhaps from the north, an already courageous undertaking. But butterflies understand miracles, transforming themselves from full-bodied worms into airborne painted flags, waving their stripes between trees and over grass and city streets to travel halfway across a continent. Arctic terns travel ten thousand miles when they migrate north on instinct. That was all Denver knew of God and miracles. If only our direction could be so sure, so clearly mapped, our drive that committed and single-minded, our strength so enduring, our transformation so visible.

  She turned the thoughts over in her mind. As powerful as we are with our science and psychology, our arms and machines that build cities and cut diamonds, the force that blows us about, what Father Allen called “Maya,” can turn us into butterflies, floppy and reckless over a cold, vast sea drifting with the impulse to live. But what if this is where the path ends for the Monarch? After it makes its way across the drab expanse of an ocean on wings that seduce like eyelashes, what if it arrives in a country where there is no milkweed?

  As Father Allen walked, he watched the sand flutter from the tips of his shoes as his feet gently kicked across the beach. He replayed the conversation with Denver over in his mind. He knew that sometimes he sounded like a priest and other times, he spoke words that would make his friends from the seminary shudder with irritation. But at some point, he had given up the pursuit of pleasing his critics. He believed that doing God’s work meant having the ability to shift with the circumstances, or knowing how to adjust one’s approach to meet the challenge at hand. A long body of sand is always shifting and adjusting, he thought to himself, why must the church be so unmoved?

  Chapter 18

  Bear Island

  Bear Island is a narrow, three and a half mile island south of the Crystal Coast along the Outer Banks of the North Carolina shoreline. It was one of the most unspoiled, unpopulated, sparkling beaches Denver had ever seen. There were large billowy dunes, tall swaying grasses, egrets, sandpipers, osprey, shell-decked beaches, silky sands, and loggerhead sea turtles, although she didn’t see them.

  The team of campers heading to Bear Island consisted of herself, Father Allen, Jimmie, and five other close friends from the church and sanctuary. Bear Island is only accessible by boat so they had the choice of either riding a ferry over to the island or taking canoes and riding through the tall grasses of the wetland region and Intracoastal Waterway. They decided to take four canoes and take their time paddling through the smooth marshy waters where snowy egrets can be seen peering over the wetland grasses.

  They gently paddled their canoes until they reached the southwest end of the island almost right at the tip where the island ends and Bear Inlet rushes in, calms, and gently ripples against the shore on the west side of the island. At its widest point, the island is only a mile and a half wide, and at the southernmost tip, they planned to watch the sunset in the evening on the west side of the island, and in the morning, walk around to the east side of the island to watch the sunrise over the Atlantic.

  Denver dropped her backpack into the sand once they all agreed on a campsite. She unhooked the tent bag from the bottom of the pack and emptied its contents onto the beach. She had borrowed the tent from Jimmie, who called it “a marvel of modern design” because of its light weight and compact size for easy carrying.

  “Jimmie, would you mind showing me how to put up this tent?” Denver asked.

  Jimmie put down his water bottle and walked over to where Denver was standing. He was in his early thirties and built like an athlete. He loved just about any kind of outdoor sport and seemed to be good at every activity he tried. Although he was quite smart, he rarely missed an opportunity to goof around, and he was often the primary source of humor at the otherwise serious and serene nature sanctuary. “I’ll show you this time,” he said, “and then you’ll be able to set it up on your own if you’re out camping and I’m not around.”

  “Okay.”

  “The tent has five pieces—the ground tarp, the two poles, the tent itself, and the rain tarp. First, unfold these pole pieces and link them together along the flexy string so that when you are finished, you have this long, yellow, bendy, flexy pole.”

  “Bendy, flexy pole,” Denver repeated.

  “Then do the same thing to the second set of pole pieces so that you have two long, yellow, bendy, flexy poles.”

  “Two long, bendy, flexy poles,” she echoed.

  “Then lay the tent on the ground and put the two bendy, flexy poles through the loops at the top of the tent so that the bendy, flexy poles form a big-ass X.”

  “A big-ass X,” Denver confirmed.

  “Then use these super duper tight-ass clasps on the top of the tent to clasp the poles to the tent.”

  “Tight-ass clasps.”

  “Now, here’s where things get a little dicey,” Jimmie said. “Stick the four ends of the long, bendy, flexy poles into the metal rings on the four ends of the tent without pinching a finger or getting your eye poked out.”

  Denver watched as the poles arced up and pulled the tent into an upright position. Jimmie adjusted the clasps a little and then lifted the tent onto the ground tarp. “Finally,” he said, “you tap these pointy-ass little stakes through these little rings and into the sand so that a hurricane doesn’t blow your cute ass out to sea in the middle of the night. See? Great lookin’ tent, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, thanks Jimmie, although I think I’ve lost count of how many asses were involved in that procedure.”

  “Only one as far as I can tell!” shouted another camper from the inside of a tent.

  Denver crawled into the two-person tent through one of the side doors. She unrolled a thin sleeping bag that filled the length of the tent and then pulled the rest of her belongings inside. She zipped the door shut and listened to the others talk and the wind blow sand against the side of the tent. Just about the time she noticed the blue sky through the window on the top of the tent, Jimmie walked by and said, “Oh, and Denver, this thick-ass rain tarp will keep your cute ass dry if it starts to rain. Just throw it over the top and stake it down.”

  “Thanks, Jimmie.” Denver opened her pack and looked at her snacks. She brought walnuts, trail mix, dark chocolate, and instant oatmeal for breakfast. She ate some walnuts and a few squares of chocolate. Camping always reminded her of Josh, even on Bear Island, which was worlds away from Desert Ring Island. Jimmie was a lot like Josh when it came to camping. He packed his backpack meticulously and was never caught without the necessary supplies, or so he said.

  Jimmie was in charge for dinner. He wanted to prepare the food for himself, Denver, and Father Allen with what he called his “handy-dandy, super-efficient, white gas-fueled, miraculously compact camping stove.” He said he could prepare a feast as good as anything you could make at home, so Denver was looking forward to watching him do it. In addition to leading tours and workshops at the sanctuary, he also occasionally offered a workshop on wilderness survival. It was nice having someone with those skills along for the trip.

  After they set up camp, they walked for a while in a large group around the tip of the island until they broke off into pairs or by themselves. The elements were harsh, but the island was teeming with life. Denver knew she wouldn’t get much sleep that night.

  It was 2 am. For a brief moment, her tent was very still in a world where everything moves with the wind, with the moon. She heard a slight tappi
ng on the side of the tent, near the bottom, like fingernails when they lightly tickle the surface of a kitchen table. Jimmie was awake too, or so she thought. She gathered her flashlight, unzipped the tent door, crawled awkwardly out of the tent, and felt the cool sand on her feet. The breeze was strong and damp and the almost full moon continued its endless lovemaking with the tide.

  She turned on her flashlight and saw crawling next to her tent a ghost crab. The beach has its foragers who know campers and what they bring with them. It was easy to see why they were called ghost crabs. It wasn’t so much the white that struck Denver, but the eyes, long and sad, blinking into the beam of light. She felt some level of strange sadness looking into the eyes of the crab. It stood still and when she moved her flashlight away from its body, it scurried into the dunes. It would be easy to step on a ghost crab because of how well they blended into the creamy sand. With the flashlight, she could see that there were tracks everywhere. While the others slept, a whole entourage of ghost crabs had come to the tents and walked away. Many of them came right to the tent doors. Perhaps places of entry reveal themselves in a universal language.

  Denver went for a walk down the beach. She meandered beyond the salt flat and strolled around to the other side of the island where the sea continues its cycle of ebb and flow. Each wave is different, each falling with a different level of intensity and stretch into the shore. It would be hard to get lost on Bear Island, but it is its own wilderness. She had heard stories of runaway people living on the island who dug holes in the sand by day to escape the sun because there are no trees. There are many shrubs and tall grasses, but no trees. While that seems perfectly reasonable, it doesn’t quite hit you until the sun begins to burn and consume every part of you, and you look around and see that there’s no place to escape.