STORY:
I had to do a little personal flying to get there, a mode that made perfect sense in the moment. By the time I touched down in the little canyon filled with crystal clear cold water, the sun had long been down despite having been up only scant seconds before. Across the water, a harmless middle-aged love-in was happening with characters holding up candles and burning sticks in tribute to the love and music flowing around them. You were there, on the side I touched down. Without saying a word, you told me the private festival on the other side wasn?t bad. I had come for a purpose, and that was to revisit a place we had both been in either a childhood wandering, or a childhood dream. Funny that we shared the memory of this near-mythic place that was probably the mangled recollection of both. Perhaps it was just a nondescript area of woods where we had played as children, not nearly as big and grand in reality as it was in our mutual minds. I had been visualizing the memory. That?s what brought me there that night, channeling my flight like a lightless beacon. I could picture the small canyon with its cold clear water, the long steep waterfall drop at the edge, the wide and winding shallow river at the bottom that turned once, maybe twice, and then opened onto a vast field of tumbled logs and ancient tree trunks. Describing it now, here, it seems only the distorted memory of the mill pond, unimpressive in its size, certainly not without its own unique grandeur, especially to the mind of a child. But this place was someplace completely different, wide and enormous once past the small, cool canyon. In my mind, though not in its waking state, I recall wolves from previous visits; wolves cresting the massive gnarled trunks, pausing to catch my eye, then slipping out of sight to follow their pack through the tangled expanse of the unending fields of fallen wood. As we stood on the opposite shore from the benign partiers, you fell into sleep leaning against the pale clay banks of the canyon. I had to go alone, though my reason isn?t obvious now, so I let you sleep. I was avoiding the water, not out of my usual fear of it, but because I had a watch on my wrist and a phone in my pocket. I was annoyed at these technological tethers. As I removed them and placed them into a small sandy pocket in the canyon wall, I remembered my childhood adventures being unrestrained by such cares. As I made ready to climb down the sharp path to the lower level, I bumped against you. You woke just enough to put your arms around me, thinking I only wanted to be comforted. I patted your arms consolingly and slipped quickly down the path. Alone at the bottom, it wasn?t as I remembered. The sandy bars and the clear river had with time become mud and sluggish ponds. The water fall no longer poured down into this level. A reedy bar allowed me to cross to the other side of what had once been the pool below a raging waterfall, now just a trickle here and there. A small cul-de-sac of alders met me on the other side, growing obstinately just outside of the pond?s reach. I had to round a corner to take in the entirety of the small copse, and as I did so, I fully expected to come eye to eye with the wolves of the valley, or perhaps some coyote. The small leafless pocket was empty when I hopefully popped into the clearing. A loneliness began to creep over me, but I continued on, needing to leave this swampy area behind and see the expanse of the tangled fields beyond. I skirted the pond, now thankful in the dark that I had brought along the slightest technology in the form of my keys with the powerful LED light in my Swiss Army knife. Shining it into the water as I walked the shore further out into what should have been the river, I was amazed to find the pond teaming with large life. Groupers, or something close to them, swarmed everywhere, most large enough to fit a man?s fist in their mouth, with an alarming amount large enough to fit half a man. Along with them, thousands of large red lobsters, or bugs almost identical to lobsters, drifted about. The water was clear, but only because the swimming creatures did not disturb the red-brown silt and algae coating the bottom like a carpet. Gone was the fast-flowing river and its deadly ice-cold current of pure clean water, replaced with this languid water that had not moved for decades, given up on itself to the rot of time. The peninsula of land I was on was moist and muddy. The branches of more alders poked my back and weakly pushed me towards the water, letting me know there wasn?t enough room in the ooze for Man. I stood there contemplating swimming through the pond toward my goal, toward where I hoped the fields still might be. My natural aversion to water coupled with my aversion to large fish nipping at me in the muck was enough to make the effort unattractive. As I turned to assess my options and look out towards the fields, something landed on my head, lightly, spindly, but very large and definite. I grabbed for the creature now partly on my head and shoulders and looked up as I did so. The young leafless alders were filled with the lobster-bugs. Not without some undoing, I threw the one picking its way through my hair to the ground. I turned back toward the wall of the canyon where the waterfall once fell. The lights of the party were lost to me, and your position, somewhere in the distance beyond me, was only a guess. Disheartened, feeling alone, I gave up finding the fields. I doubted they lay unchanged where they once were. The whole world now seemed a dismal fish and bug-infested swamp. Directly across from me lay the shore I had skirted to get here. The water between, though much deeper and unmanageable before, was now only a foot deep at the most. Happy to be done with the excursion even quicker, I ran out into the water. Muddy, but passable, I ran toward shore. It was only halfway across that I realized the deadly error I had made. My loud and human crossing was scattering fish and lobster-bugs in a swirling path of disruption, alerting larger creatures that now ruled this pond of my presence. I had not until that moment noticed how dark the night had grown. I shone my light to my sides and saw only the ghosts of fish and the ripples of my eagerness fade to black. I turned slowly, shining the light into the dark, shallow water behind me. The enormity of the creature, even under water still ten feet or more away, stunned me. In that split second, I knew awe and fear and mortality. I knew what the antelope feels as it sees the end of its short life in the eye of a lioness; the fly, trapped in the spider?s world, who ceases to struggle. Alone, in the water, in the dark, with only a small pocket knife in my hand, I knew the imminence of death. The massive reptile torpedoed through the water faster than I could comprehend. I couldn?t hope to turn and run to the shore. I would be hit from behind unaware, taken down face-first into the muck with ten feet and four hundred pounds of armored muscle destroying my frail humanity. Hopeless as it was, to stand and watch my own death was more comforting than a death buried in mud. Futilely, I reasoned the exposed keys sharing space next to the closed blade on my pocket knife were my best option. Perhaps I could gouge at its armored eye while it locked its foot wide-jaws around my legs. My legs, if I was lucky. I realized how my technology and my evolved capacity for reason mattered so little in the face of this hurtling piece of prehistoric biology. Even if I were to shout out, provided my lungs were not ruptured and spent, I would be dragged to deeper waters before you could even open your eyes. I woke without a start, only a realization of what happened next. I lay there, feeling as if I had just passed through the curtain of death and found calm. It was a considerable amount of time before I could convince myself that I was indeed alive. I went about my day with a respect and gravity for the ancient reptile. It hadn?t attacked out of malice, but out of indifference. I know it will come after me the next time we meet. It will always be there waiting; detached, patient, eternal.

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