Russell Banks - Lost Memory of Skin

But these are thoughts he doesn’t want or need right now. It’s peaceful here. He’s anchored the houseboat about twenty feet off the eastern shore of the slough and he wants to concentrate on catching his supper which he just saw break the water in the weedy shadows cast by a stand of slash pines at the edge of the slough: a silvery swirl and slosh and then expanding rings of concentric ripples. It’s within easy casting distance from the boat even for the Kid who has never used a casting rod before. He’s seen it done of course by Rabbit and other denizens under the Causeway fishing in the Bay and can imitate them: a little flick of the wrist, an overhand toss of a squirming worm impaled on the hook, follow-through with the arm extended and the worm and red-striped white plastic bobber plops into the water and you watch the bobber go still until it’s suddenly pulled under and you jerk back on the rod and start reeling in what turns out to be a bluegill the shape and size of the Kid’s open palm.

Excellent first catch! Life as it was meant to be lived in the Bible when God gave human beings the Garden of Eden and told them to be fruitful and multiply. He cuts the fish open and guts and beheads it and realizes that without its head and tail it’ll barely provide two or at most three small bites so he’s going to need to catch five or six more bluegills if he wants to feed himself and his crew properly tonight. Which does not displease him. He’s happy to have to continue catching fish here in the Garden of Eden with Babylon completely out of sight and mind.

Except for the whir of the reel and the plop of the worm and bobber hitting the water at the end of his cast the only sounds are tree frogs creaking like rusty hinges and a chirping choir of crickets. The sun has slipped closer to the treetops on the western shore of the slough. Mosquitoes have begun to cloud around his face and arms but he has plenty of repellent which he spreads over his skin and he has a mosquito net to hang over his cot later. He catches two more bluegills in quick succession. Then two more. Almost enough. He cracks open a can of beer chilled in ice and takes a thrilling first gulp — the first swallow of a cold beer is always the best. It’s what you remember when you want another swallow and another beer and though they’re never as thrilling as the first the memory lingers on anyhow so you can’t complain. Reeling in his sixth bluegill in twenty minutes the Kid can’t complain about anything right now. If this isn’t heaven, which he doesn’t believe exists anyhow, it certainly is paradise.

IT’S A NEW WORLD THE KID IS LIVING IN. Literally as well as figuratively. In geological time the entire state, and especially its waterlogged southwestern corner, have only recently been delivered from the ocean. Toward the end of the Pleistocene period barely twenty thousand years ago the planet entered a last great ice age, and glaciers expanded south and north from the Poles. As the air cooled, evaporation of seawater into the atmosphere slowed, and for millennia sea levels dropped six and ten feet a century, until at last, in the shallow waters of the Caribbean off the blunt southern edge of North America, waves from the Gulf of Mexico and waves from the Atlantic begin to crash against one another and then to part and fall upon newly risen banks of coral and sand, and the long narrow subtropical peninsula gradually surfaces dripping and puddled from beneath the blue-green Caribbean.

Seeds from Cuba, Jamaica, Puerto Rico, and Santo Domingo float northward on the warm currents and winds and float south from the North American continent in the new streams and rivers and take root in the freshly emerged land, and soon there are grasses and tropical and subtropical trees and flowering shrubs and all manner of flora spreading over the land. And large schools of fish and mammals from the seas, porpoises, manatees, and seals, swim into the saline estuaries and up into the streams and marshes where they meet freshwater fish and mammals swimming down from the northern highlands into the rivers, lakes, marshes, and estuaries of the peninsula. Sun-blotting flocks of birds break their long winter migrations to the South American and Caribbean tropics and make landfall here and stay and build nests in the new trees and in among the mangroves and marshes and take up year-round residence and are fruitful and multiply. Solitary panthers and packs of red wolves in pursuit of smaller fangless prey, antelopes, squirrels, and rabbits, lope down from the wintry hills of the Alleghenies into the high-grass veldts expanding between islands of subtropical deciduous, pine, and palm trees and begin to thrive here. The large grass-eaters, bison, deer, and elk that have been roaming in hungry herds across the freezing upland plains, drift south, munching their way toward the abundant green year-round leaves and tall grasses. Behind them come lumbering onto the peninsula the very large animals slowest to roam, the megafauna — gigantic bears, mammoths, and mastodons, horse-size sloths and enormous land turtles. Until finally, following the megafauna, killing off the huge slow-footed animals with reckless abandon, come the humans — the spear-carrying, fire-making, highly intelligent and organized descendants of Asiatic hunters and gatherers migrating south and east onto the newly risen peninsula where there is a seemingly endless harvest available winter and summer from sea and land alike, where the temperature rarely drops below freezing or rises above what is pleasantly tolerable, a climate perfectly suited to their nearly naked, tattooed and painted, furless bodies.

The Kid knows nothing of this five-millennia-long sequence. He only knows what has happened to him in his personal twenty-two-year-long narrative. And of that he’s aware of mostly unconnected bits and thus has no comprehensive sense of his lifetime’s arc. But while he sleeps in paradise beneath the stars and the moon aboard his houseboat deep in the Great Panzacola Swamp with his old yellow dog sprawled on the deck beside him and his companion parrot in a cloth-covered cage next to the dog, he dreams the pictures and sounds of the slow making of his paradise.

A dream can compress eons into minutes, and that way the Kid lives through thousands of years of silence broken only by the sound of the waves lapping the shore and the clatter of palms in the warm winds off the sea, centuries of birdsong and the mating calls of frogs, the hoot of owls in the night, the splash of a gar snagging a mullet and an alligator’s scrambling rush from shore into the water in pursuit of the gar, a sudden thrash in the saw grass as a panther brings down an unwary deer: everything heard and seen in his dream signifying merely the constant presence of the wind, the sea, and the slow-flowing waters over the land, the search by all the creatures living on the land and in the waters for mates for procreation and the necessary death of one creature strictly to feed another: the natural world in its evolutionary passage through time.

Centuries pass quickly into millennia, and while the Kid sleeps aboard his boat, continental and global weather patterns shift again. Rainfall, especially in summer and autumn in the north and central parts of the peninsula, is heavy now, creating large shallow inland lakes that seasonally flood and spill over their southern banks onto the drought-dried flatlands beyond, the floodwaters flowing slowly in sheets and wide meandering streams toward the Caribbean and the Gulf where gradually in the lower southwestern corner of the peninsula a vast wetland grows, the beginnings of the Great Panzacola Swamp. Old temperate flora and fauna from the late Pleistocene and the Ice Age get gradually displaced by tropical and subtropical wetland plants, insects, reptiles, birds, and mammals. Large stands of cypress trees appear along the coasts, and mangroves proliferate and spread from the estuaries into the inland waterways, clogging the streams and regularly rerouting them. Tidal ridges laid down at the birth of the peninsula by the action of ancient waves and midden heaps built by the first humans become low-lying tree islands and densely forested hammocks surrounded by sloughs and threaded by slow-flowing rivers and streams.