Mark Falkin - The Late Bloomer

I don’t need to paddle much. The water’s been moving with the upstream influx. All I’ve had to do is dip my paddles to steer. I try to stay near the banks but they’ve overflowed so much that at times I’m afraid of getting caught up in drowned trees or an eddy.

The morning of, the children got a download, and I think I did too. The code has been buried within me until now. Now, on this river, it’s starting to boot me up into this new me.

I tell you this story when I’m on shore before sleep, after boiling water and feeding Maggie, but mostly when I’m in easygoing miles-long sections. Telling this story has helped me process it all. It has kept me company, kept me hopeful, and has enabled me to see the bigger picture. It has tracked my journey, my evolution from the sounds heard that dawn to now.

I feel as if I am actually communing with you. Talking to whoever may read this, in a future that is hopefully settled and sane, it makes me feel good when nothing else does. That’s as best I can say it.

But, really, I pretend. I pretend to have a conversation with someone else. There’s hope in the noises I make. Like whistling past a graveyard.

The river had its noises, moaned and whispered its way to the sea. Birds followed us overhead, their wingspan at full sail in these new winds.

“What do you think, killa? Should I begin way back in June when I was having those dreams while reading Lord of the Flies , writing The Late Bloomers , Johnny’s sleepwalking?”

Mags looked back at me, these being the first words I’d uttered since we veered away from the rowing center’s platform. The hinges holding the thing to the shore had screamed as we paddled clear. The shipwrecked kids in Lord of the Flies feared a beast. The naval officer says at the end, “Fun and games.” Then the boys all cry, smudging their war paint. They are saved. The end.

Maybe I’m the naval officer. I come by boat. When I arrive, Kodie and I will convince them that there is nothing to fear. The world has changed, but this beast is just a residual nightmare representing all that fear that has come with such sudden, jarring change. Change is their beast. I’ll help them.

I could tell you about this float trip, but that’s not what this story is about. And really, it’s just a river swollen over pastoral Texas, trees and hills, a few towns. The water is so high now, the towns on the river flooded. The tops of trees, rooftops, commercial signage sticking up just above the surface looking like eerie buoys.

Cruising by the Hyatt Lost Pines resort hotel, I could see right into the rooms of the third floor, the top. The kayak brushed against the metal patio bars. Maggie’s ears perked; she peered inside, too. Pillows floated. We’d gone there for a family trip about three years ago. Johnny and I played in the little water park. We had a good time, though I was always wary of looking like a tool in front the girls sunning themselves at the pool. Mom read a thick paperback (though she kept stashing it, I knew it was Fifty Shades ). Martin would meet us for dinner each night all sunburned, beer-blitzed and talking loud with golfing buddies. She and Martin weren’t talking much.

Paddling under Highway 71 and later I-10, I looked up and thought my head clearance was questionable. Dark and unnerving and full of echoes.

Maggie keeps watch at night. I catch her copping Zs during the day, standing there swaying with her eyes closed. Sometimes she just curls up in the front well.

I ration my jerky. I drink my boiled water. I’m so tired I’m in a daze. They help me. Their singing helps me. I don’t see them, but they’re out there. I wish they’d talk to me. I’ll just keep talking to you.

I’ll share a memory. I haven’t and won’t go into a bunch of stuff from my life, mostly because it makes me too sad to think about. Though this is about my experience during these early days of the new world, here’s one far-back memory I like to hold on to.

It’s of me and Mom and Dad. This is when I’m young, like six, a couple of years before they got divorced and Dad moved across the country. I guess I hold on to this because it’s the last time I can remember our threesome being happy together. Not saying there weren’t other times, just saying this is the strong one that popped into my head. The ground in the front yard was hard underneath the blanket we’d put down. This was in the first house I ever lived in, the one I came home from the hospital to, on Waterston, not far from Town Lake, which is what it was called back then.

Fourth of July, evening. We awaited the fireworks display which would shoot over the lake. We could see the whole thing from our front yard. Dad had a radio out there with us and the classical station played the patriotic marches, but what I remember is the 1812 Overture. We had finished eating grilled hot dogs, potato salad, and apple pie and we were just waiting for darkness to come.

Dad and Mom lay on the blanket facing each other propped on their elbows. I was drinking a Coke in a tall beveled glass bottle. They drank from glass bottles too. The ground was too hard for me so I marched around, knees up, chin up, officious look on my face, hamming it up for my folks. They laughed so hard that Mom’s forehead fell against Dad and she snorted. I just kept going and then they got up and fell in behind me. We marched all over the yard, then up the street still within earshot of the music, and back again.

It got dark and we’d forgotten ourselves. Then a big boom. We stood in the street in front of our house, and the thundering sound scared us and Dad picked me up, held Mom close. We looked up and there was the first firework, huge, in bloom and expanding. We could hear the faraway crowd cheering. Mom, Dad and me holding each other tight, the initial fear wearing off, standing in the street looking up.

Just as I finish having this memory, replaying it for you now… this is when I hear the children, thousands of them amassed in the dark, cheering, and it sounds so much like what my memory tells me I heard that July night eleven years ago that it makes me cry.

On the bank of this engorged river, it’s finally hitting me.

There’s a heaviness in my throat and in my chest and I know that this is what mourning feels like.

Maggie’s tied to me with a leash. She comes over to me as I cry and leans into me.

They kept cheering and cheering in a mad loop. Finally, I had cried myself out and then they stopped. But there’s no sleep.

Nope, I lie awake, talk to you, looking up at an array of stars like I’ve never seen, what the ancients saw when they looked up and now I understand the awe and fear they must have felt. With all of our lights and rationality, we humans lost our awe. At least the adults did.

As for the late bloomers like me, like Kodie, we’re stuck in the middle. And in the middle in which I am now stuck I am feeling pretty damned awed.

I lie here under this incredible smear of starshine and want to be awed some more, but I keep thinking of the webbing jumping between them as they stood in front of the tracks.

Out there they anticipate my every breath. They breathe with me, a sighing sound that starts to merge with the sounds of the ocean in my mind.

I feel their need.

Maggie smells it first. She’s been probing the air with her nose all morning, drawing in big drams of it. I know we’re getting close. When under the hot light of a south Texas morning I see the first fronds of a palm tree poking above the water’s surface and I smell the ocean’s salt, my pulse speeds up and stays there.

There’s been nothing since crossing under Route 59. Not a town, not a landmark, nothing but treetops and the tops of a few sturdy windmills and far-off gas station signs. I must’ve skirted Bay City east of the river and another, Buckeye, which was just west of the river. Maybe those things sticking up earlier was Buckeye.