Thursday, March 26, 2015

Obliteration


One warm summer night a long time ago, I slipped into the midnight water of an Oklahoma farm pond near the city where I grew up. I remember, for many reasons, that particular night among the countless similar nights spent chasing fish. I remember it for the peculiar, ghostly quality of the crescent moonlight shimmering on the gin-clear water, and for the solitude, always the solitude. I remember it for the inky velvet sky that seemed so close above me, for the way the water transformed into brilliant sprays of molten silver every time a hooked bass broke the surface. I remember the slap of the beaver's tail, the tympanic chorus of the bullfrogs, the wonder I felt at the countless unseen life-and-death struggles taking place in the space around and below me as I floated on the water's surface.  But most of all, I remember that night for the exquisite rightness of it all, the synchronicity of place and moment, the sense that this was exactly where I was supposed to be and what I supposed to be doing in this place at this time. Nowhere else but here. Nothing else but this. Nothing. Such moments are not sustainable, of course, but their memory is what sustains us.

I caught a number of bass that night, but I specifically remember only one. It was not particularly large, maybe three pounds, but so vividly and deeply marked that after I brought it to the float tube and unhooked it, I held it there on its side in the water before me, marveling at its color, its pulsing, primordial aliveness. It remains, to this day, one of the most beautiful fish I have ever caught. And as I floated there in the warm water, half in my world, half in its, I slowly released that bass from my hands. It hovered there for a second or two, suspended in the celestial waters, its pectoral fins sweeping back and forth, before disappearing into the luminous depths somewhere between the moon and the stars. I have never forgotten the memory of that bass and that moment and that place.

I fished the pond many times after that night. I hunted it, too, watched my first chessie, now long dead, retrieve ducks from its waters. But that moment stayed with me. Eventually, however, I moved away and those experiences turned to memories, which in turn were overlaid with other, newer memories tethered to other, newer places.

But not long ago, and twenty years since the above picture was taken on that pond, I found myself strolling, as they say, down memory lane. Only memory lane was no longer a bucolic and familiar path, but a teeming, bewildering concrete artery four lanes wide and buzzing with people, so many people seething with purpose and impatience and irritation toward the dawdler poking along trying to find old memories buried under the asphalt and intersections and Bermuda grass and sidewalks. Eventually I came to the place I was looking for.

My pond was gone, of course; it had been drained, filled in, leveled, compacted, surveyed, flagged, gridded and erased; both it and the mixed-grass prairie surrounding it scraped clean, smoothed, and then covered with a skin of fresh, glistening progress. Rows of vinyl and brick-clad houses so close together you could literally jump from roof to roof lined streets so new the gleaming asphalt still exuded an oily stench. Beyond the cookie-cutter houses I could see the dozers and graders and other earth-moving equipment scraping away what remained of the half-section that once contained my pond. It was all going under the blade, and when it was finished there would be nothing - absolutely nothing; not a native tree or plum thicket or blade of grass -  to indicate that it had ever been anything other than poorly-planned, cheaply constructed, high-density suburban sprawl. Planned blight. 

Never have I seen the physical place of memory so completely obliterated and transformed into something so different from its original form. A befuddled middle-aged man was now driving, roughly, over the same spot where the kid that man used to be had once floated on water so alive, had once caught a bass that haunted him still. The same spot where that kid had shot mallards and gadwall and wigeon and watched a young dog leap like a brown missile into the water after them and drop their bodies into his outstretched hand. Wonder and amazement and magic are the gods of place, but they are old and feeble gods these days, and powerless against the gods of profit and progress.

Memory is a helluva thing. We carry it within us, but still have the urge to seek out the physical markers and locations of where that memory was created, where it was once not memory, but experience. We seek out these places, with our now so distant from our then, to remind ourselves that yes, that did indeed once happen, and it happened here. But what if that here is now gone? What becomes of that memory? Are all memories ghosts, or just the ones that no longer have anything physical upon which to tether?

I tried to reconcile what I remembered with what I was seeing, but reality had already begun untethering memory from place, corrupting the close association of the two I'd had in my mind all these years. I suspect in another twenty years I'll have as much luck trying to remember the first day of my life as I will trying to remember the details of that night. Nothing is permanent, not even memory. I turned and got the hell out of there as quickly as I could.
   

12 comments:

  1. Brilliant. You've come back with a vengance!

    Every time I go home to Norman I am amazed at the changes. But I am also amazed that the memories of the place and my 21 years there, both true and false memories, remain somewhat intact, somewhat faded, and somewhat more tragic or heroic than what actually occured. So I've got that going for me...

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    1. It's like it's an alien town. I actually go lost walking around the OU campus a while back...

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  2. Best damn piece of writing I've had the pleasure of reading in quite some time.

    If you don't publish, I will perish.

    BJ

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  3. http://uplandish.blogspot.com/2014/07/yesterday-birds.html

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  4. I grew up on a street, a single street, carved out of an orthopedic surgeon's hobby farm. There was a swamp across the street from my parents' house, and beyond the swamp, a few hundred acres of crops, pasture and woods. From a kitchen window, we watched our Gordon Setter bounding, head up, through the wheat. The kids on the street and I used to pilot downed trees through the swamp in the summer and play hockey on it in the winter. When I was old enough to take guns out by myself, I hunted squirrels in the woods. And when I was a little older than that, I kissed girls from the girls' high schools in St. Louis at bonfires I made in the empty winter fields.

    But, the surgeon died, and then his wife who let me play tennis on her court, died too. Their children sold most of the land to a home builder which builds plastic-sided houses close together. Reading this piece, I realized how much I long to see the house in which I grew up. But I can't bear the loss of the view it had and I cannot bear the view it has.

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    1. CG, your story mirrors just about every piece of land I hunted or fished growing up.

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  5. Our house has an abandoned railroad line running behind it. For many years there's been a nice stand of nothing-in-particular volunteer trees behind our house; those have been our partial shield against the infringement of those plastic-sided houses that threaten us from the other side. I often hear bob whites peeping their distinctive song behind our back fence (which has been the squirrel highway), and we enjoy seeing the rabbits. The colors the trumpet vine and wild rose that have taken over one side of the right of way are beautiful for a good part of the year. We'd see the occasional jogger or someone walking their dog.

    Now it's being turned into a "nature trail". The first thing they did was tear out most of the trees. The big one with the huge squirrel nest is gone; I'm sure the quail will be too. They've ripped out most of the vines, and for the past few days big machines have been up and down it in preparation for paving. I guess some people's idea of a "nature trail" is different from mine; I thought that's what we had all along.

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  6. Maybe a damn tornado will begin to rectify your memory. Then a fracking quake will open up a new pond in the rubble. And the drought will end and fill it in. Maybe.

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    1. Ha! Don't forget the wildfires. And killer hail...

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  7. You probably know this, Chad, but this is really good stuff! Compelling. Nuanced. Almost like it was written by a real writer.

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    1. Half-ass writer who hasn't been doing a helluva lot of writing lately...

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