Chris Offutt - The Same River Twice - A Memoir

A beaver-downed tree spreads its branches along the ice where the river touches land. The current carries hundreds of small fish along the surface. Most are dead, but a few still struggle with feeble fins. A dozen float in a pool formed by a beaver dam, and I wonder if they are of the same spawn, born and dying together. I imagine being in the woods with my children, and realize that I’m already thinking in the plural, although we have yet to name the first. The baby Rita carries will need an ally against me. A backup prevents extinction. This need for another name reduces the pressure of choosing one now. Like Adam, I have room for error.

More dead fish are floating by, tiny and silver, the shape of a spearpoint. Life will divide siblings as surely as a dam divides the river. The Hindu goddess Bindumati parted the Ganges, and Isis divided the Phaedras River. Moses came late to the myth. He suffered a speech impediment and relied on his brother’s eloquence until they entered the wilderness and began to disagree. Thinking of Aaron’s magic rod, I use a forked stick to lift a fish from the river. A black spot behind each eye marks it as a gizzard shad, a fragile creature that cannot sustain sudden changes in temperature. Thousands die every year, entire clans wiped out. Our child will never have a big brother or sister, nor wear hand-me-downs. I place the shad on the log for a possum or coon. Nothing dies before its time.

Beneath the snow is a layer of last fall’s leaves, and walking it is like treading upon a mattress. The ground is marked by deer print and droppings. I remove my glove and squeeze a pellet between thumb and forefinger. It’s soft, still warm. I’m close.

When I stop at the edge of a clearing, a deer lifts its head to watch me with the bold curiosity of a raccoon. Direct eye contact is a sign of aggression that will scare most animals, and I turn my head, looking to the side of the deer. We share the gift of acknowledgment. It will outwait me because there is no time in the woods, only life and rot, with weather at the edges. I have never owned a watch. Time is a Rorschach folded into a Möbius strip turned inside out, upside down. Time is the name we give to living. Modern science presents us with kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, and species — designating every organism on the planet. Once identified, it is ours, as with a nickname known only to a private few. Quantum physics has taken to naming the theoretical, much like concocting a name for an unborn infant. Nothing exists that is not labeled; like killing, it is our assertion over the world.

The deer I’m watching moves to nibble a branch, accustomed to my shape among the trees and brush. Something immobile is not a threat. The deer looks back at me occasionally and I imagine that it recognizes its fur in my beard. My cheek begins to itch but I refuse to scratch it and drive the deer to flight. Many eons ago, the name was identical with the thing itself, a method of comprehension. The word “deer” comes from the Old English “deor,” meaning “beast.” Gradually the word moved from the general to the specific. A beast became the deer. The present denudes the past.

In Sanskrit, naman means both “name” and “soul.” Dogs, cats, and horses receive our patronizing gift of a name because they knuckle under us. My mother talks to her houseplants and gives them names. Language protects us, the foremost tool of the weakest mammal. To name is to know, the first step of identity. One child, one name; the grafting of the soul.

A crow angles into a hickory and perches with its bill parted, a young bird’s habit from the nest, waiting for food. When I turn my head to look at it, the deer flees, tail raised like a flag of surrender. Its abrupt flight startles me. I sense its fear, a feeling that I fill with my own sudden panic. I hurry across the hardened earth, certain that Rita is giving birth.

My panting entrance to the house awakens her on the couch. She’s had no contractions. The baby has dropped, but its head has not yet engaged, still floating in its private amniotic river. I bring Rita juice and sit beside her, waiting like the crow for the sustenance of life. We settle on a name. If it’s a boy, we’ll call it Sam and worry about the particulars later.

Rita stretches her arms for a hug, breasts swollen, hair silken on my face. The smell of fresh-split white oak fills the house. We lie on the couch all day, watching early darkness cloud the air. I press my belly against hers, feel the baby move. The moon hangs round and white as a fresh tree stump. I feed the fire, knowing that our child’s birth will drive a velvet wedge between us. We’re less lovers than partners now, old buddies facing weather, followers of habit. We’ve spread our wings and mated for life. She has taken my name.

Two days after leaving Boston, I slept beneath a picnic table at a rest stop in Grizzard, Virginia, My body was stiff but I felt an adrenalized state of grace. The crammed sprawl of the Northeast lay behind me, I was bound for the southernmost tip of continental America, a gigantic swamp, a river of grass. I decided to give up alcohol and dope. The Everglades would be my detox center, a monastery. I was certain to live there the rest of my life.

An independent trucker stopped because he needed someone to keep him awake. Twenty hours later he dropped me off just south of Jacksonville, where I watched hundreds of drivers cruise along 1-95 without so much as glancing my way. I walked several miles to the intersection of A1A and found a message on a road sign. Scratched into the shiny metal back, as if by a dying man writing his own epitaph, were these words: “Worst place in USA to get a ride. 3 days here. Fuck Florida. Fritz.”

Below that ran an equally chilling ledger of the road:

3 days — Will

27 hours — Schmitty

17 hours — Larry

2 1/ 2days — Pablo

32 hours — Phil

1 day, 4 hours, 18 minutes — Pete the Tick

At the very bottom of the sign, carved with a wavering hand, was the finale: “You’re stuck, brother. Kick back, smoke dope, get high.”

Until a few thousand years ago, Florida was under water, making it the world’s most recent substantial landmass to emerge. Reading that sign made me wish it had remained in the sea. The lovely resort town of Flamingo was better than four hundred miles away. I decided to buck the odds, trust whichever goddess watched over vagrants and swamplands, and hang my thumb to the wind. To dodge the sun, I stood in the sliver of shadow cast by the sign. Seven hours later I was still there, bug-chewed, delirious from the heat, facing the flip side of freedom — the numb despair of immobility.

Nine miles east lay the ocean, an eternity of light-years away. The rest of the continent spread above me like a fan. I realized that I had no idea what I was up to, in fact never had. Twelve years after leaving Kentucky, I was still roving the twentieth century, ineluctably alone and no better at it, merely accustomed to the circumstance. The West was fenced, Everest climbed, and Africa plumbed. Even Tibet had white men moving through it like a plague. Thumbing was a pathetic substitute for adventure. As a young man, I’d found this means of travel ideal, but now I was thirty, beyond the excuse of youth. For the first time in my life, I felt aged.

I crossed the highway, turned north, and was picked up by an old fisherman hauling a tin skiff in a pickup. The back third of the boat hung from the truck. He made me sit in the boat. As soon as we crossed into Georgia, I banged on the window and hopped out. He gave me half a can of bug spray, the most useful gift I’ve ever received. By dawn, the can was empty and I no longer bothered to scratch the bites that covered my body. The flesh around my eyes was swollen to blindness. When I staggered from the brush, two college boys stopped their car. They seemed disappointed that I was a victim of insects rather than a dope deal gone sour. Out of pity they allowed me passage to Florida.