Chris Offutt - The Same River Twice - A Memoir

My official poetry notebook rapidly filled with journal entries. Friendless and stranded as I was, the journal became a prolonged scream into the swamp, the incessant chatter of a man talking to himself. This was my most productive period.

Hot air falling off the African coast had found a low-pressure spot fed by chilly wind. Heat and cold spun into a tropical depression which moved across the Atlantic, gathering force, following the traditional path of storms. I was elated when it achieved storm status and the name of Jacob, Several times a day the radio station in Key West gave its latitude and longitude, which I charted on my small grid. As the storm failed to dissipate, I became more and more hopeful, staying in my room, listening to the radio. The announcer spoke in a slow drawl. He had a habit of pausing between phrases long enough for me to pose a question in anticipation of what he’d say. When I was right, it was as if he’d answered the question and I was conversing with someone.

“Where you broadcasting from, Joe?” I asked.

“This is Joseph Grady in Key West…”

“What are you talking about?”

“… with an update on tropical storm Jacob…”

“Okay, where is it?”

“… four hundred miles offshore with winds at seventy-five miles per hour. The National Weather Service now calls it a hurricane…”

I heard a noise outside my window. Half expecting to see a tidal wave pushed by Jacob, I jerked the curtain back. Dirt stood behind the glass. “Narc!” he snarled, showing both his middle fingers. “Fucking radio narc!” He backed into the darkness, slapping mosquitoes.

Two days later Jacob was sixty miles offshore, bearing for the coast. Life in the park hadn’t changed except that the hostility toward me had become quite open after Dirt’s discovery of my radio. I ignored everyone and focused on the hurricane. At the ranger station I compared my small chart with the big one on the wall. The numbers matched but the pinpoints on the map were different. My route showed Jacob aimed directly at us, but the wall chart had the hurricane missing Flamingo by two hundred miles. I copied the official numbers onto a new graph, recharted the path, and compared it to the one on the wall. Instead of finding my error, I discovered the ranger’s mistake.

I rapped on the office door. The ranger was hunched over his radio, sweaty and tense. I expected Joseph Grady’s voice but heard only fuzzy static. The ranger smacked his fist against the desk and moaned.

“Son of a bitch,” he said. “They walked him.”

I showed him the discrepancy and his face became pale as milk. He swallowed twice.

“I’ve got to tell the head ranger,” he whispered.

The tourists were evacuated. The ranger packed equipment and left at dusk. Bucky decided to wait another forty-eight hours to save the expense of lodging employees in Miami hotels. Jacob moved thirty miles closer. Joe Grady warned that traffic out of the Keys was very heavy, and drivers should be careful. The sky was dark gray, the weather incredibly calm. The surf rose all day.

The next morning, Jacob sprawled like a monster on the horizon. At noon the hurricane’s perimeter swept over the swamp in wind and rain. Strange wet leaves pasted themselves to every surface. The water had risen six feet, but it seemed as if the land had sunk. Employees formed a convoy that I was not asked to join. Dirt led the procession into the mangroves.

I went to my room and wrote a will, leaving everything to my brother, I tried to write a poem but couldn’t get past the title—“Blue Flamingo.” I bundled my journal in a plastic garbage bag, put on a poncho, and carried the package outside. I had never felt so calm. Jacob was closer now. I climbed the superstructure of the breezeway to a roof support. The bay below chopped white, full of sticks. I tied my package behind a steel post facing away from the sea, toward the rest of America.

Years ago, I’d left. Kentucky and set into motion a pattern of repetitive exile that had ended by dropping me into a rapidly sinking swamp. I had entered the world to become a man and wound up truly caring about very little. Most of my life had been a sequence of halfhearted attempts at self-destruction. Somehow I’d always scampered away — you can’t get me, I’m the gingerbread man. Now I faced a worthy death, a death of honor in the face of a stormy god. I felt as if I’d summoned the hurricane like a farmer calling hogs, or a shaman making rain. Jacob was coming for me and I would meet him freely. Hoka hey.

During a brief period of calm, I heard Dirt’s big Harley in the parking lot. Behind it came the cars. I dropped to the catwalk and asked why they’d come back.

“Roads are flooded past my waist,” Dirt said.

I looked at Jacob hulking twenty-five miles away. He had turned us into an island. An arm of rain lashed my face. Everyone ran for cover and I began to laugh. No one had rain gear except me.

I stayed on the breezeway past dark and watched Dirt and Slim break into the bar. They made three trips, carrying out beer and liquor by the case, giggling insanely the entire time. The night was black as a cow’s insides. Bored by my death vigil and exhausted from tensing against the wind, I left the breezeway. Through an open door to a room I saw several people naked, each holding a bottle of liquor.

I went to my room and woke with the sea twenty feet from my back door. Joe Grady told me the hurricane had stopped sixteen miles from the tip of Florida. I dressed and pulled on my poncho. Outside, Rafe was calmly vomiting, wearing only a bra. In the dining room two people ate peaches from a can while drinking beer. I fixed a sandwich and walked to the edge of land.

The eye of a hurricane is big enough for planes to fly into. From this central axis extend dozens of spiral arms composed of wind and rain. The farther they are from the hub, the more they blend together. With Jacob’s eye so close, each arm was distinct from the rest. As the hurricane spun, one arm after another struck the coast, like spokes in a wagon wheel. Three minutes of incredibly fierce wind brought on a horizontal rain of pellets the size of rocks. The rain stopped abruptly, followed by three minutes of absolute calm between the arms. Then the cycle repeated.

I sat a few feet from the ocean and watched the horizon turn dark on the left side, clear on the right. As the hurricane rotated,* the colors switched sides. The sky seemed to spin like a top, flashing black and white. Time moved in a hypnotic cycle of wind rain calm, wind rain calm. The periods of utter calm were the most frightening, a feint before Jacob delivered another blast of power.

A large pelican tried to fly against the wind. Though it was a few feet from me, I could not hear the sound of its heavy wings. The bird appeared suspended in midair, unable to go forward regardless of effort. A sudden gust hurled it to the ground with killing force.

Night arrived early and I returned to the dining room for food. Shards of broken whiskey bottles glittered underfoot. Mold had already begun to form on the half-eaten food that lay on the tables and floor. Someone slept in a corner. Dirt sat in a folding chair like lost royalty in a demented kingdom, legs open to accommodate Vickie Uno woman on her knees before him. Her head rose and fell. Rafe crouched beside her. “Not bad,” he was saying. “Use your neck, not your shoulders.”

I made a sandwich, found some carrots, and went to the breezeway. The shadow of my wrapped notebook clung to the steel brace like a cocoon. The lulling, calm was at hand, a warm night in the tropics. From the bay below came the sound of the Heron steadily banging the dock. The mangroves and ocean blended with the sky in a vast darkness, as if the world had turned inside out to create a cave. Rain battered my poncho like buckshot. Water gushed along the breezeway.