Little Rivers (& What Lurks Within Them)
Hello, LWON community! I’m new to the blog, and I’m thrilled to be included in this excellent company of writers and readers. I hope you’ll enjoy my first post.
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Lauren drew her feet up slowly from the water and gave me a look somewhere between worry and wonder. It was late afternoon, and we sat together beside a swimming hole in upstate New York. Deep shade, cool breeze, a reprieve from the scorch of August. Nearby, water bugs the size of pinto beans surfed in tight formation and our kids scuttled over moss-skinned rocks.
She said, “What might be in the water that was biting me?”
This was a question I had not expected, and I felt my eyebrow rise, Spock-like. It wasn’t that I doubted her, but she was from California and this was an eastern river. In a lifetime spent wading and wandering, canoeing, swimming and skating over water like this I had never been bitten by anything that I had not first harassed with a pole or a net or my own dumb hands. Lauren hadn’t done any of that. She’d simply slipped into the current with her young daughter and sat there.
I ran quickly through a list of suspects—fish, snakes, turtles, crayfish—and quickly dismissed most of them. Sort of feebly I suggested that sunfish or minnows had done it, something small and harmless. Think of those spas, I offered, where people let fish nibble on their toes.
“I think they call it ichthyotherapy.”
Lauren’s eyes narrowed.
“It was more than a nibble,” she said.
I stood and looked back at the swimming hole. It lay below a wall of sedimentary rock, over which ribbons of white water fell into a broad emerald pool. Earlier I’d stood at the top of the wall, peering down, scanning for hazards before I leapt. I’d seen sunfish floating near the surface, and way down deep I’d glimpsed several carp. They were huge, Devonian. Some as big as my four-year-old. But even those monsters wouldn’t come for human flesh.
Suddenly I felt thrilled and also unnerved. What lived here that I did not know, that I could not name?
———
I hadn’t expected much from that particular river. It ran just south of Albany, not far beyond the city’s industrial fringe. Also it was wedged between a highway and the Hudson River—twin channels of traffic and trash. But I’ve learned that with my kids, all of them Brooklyn-raised, I must take every chance to be with them in nature. So even if the swimming wasn’t great, even if the water was sludgy and looked mean, even if we didn’t go swimming at all, the trip would be worthwhile. Because it took us into the woods.
The swimming turned out to be perfect. Jumping in you felt yourself slice through gradients of light and heat, from green to gray to shivering black. That there were not only fish in the depths but also snakes along shore and many birds in the trees above settled my worry about water quality and added an extra dimension of joy. We weren’t merely swimming, we were sharing space with other beings.
But now there was a mystery, and I badly wanted to know who the biter was. I was embarrassed that I hadn’t been able to figure it out. I’d been raised in the East. I’d been a park ranger in Massachusetts, worked as an outdoor educator in Maine and New Hampshire. When I was a kid we’d even lived on a river: it was called Neponset, a word of the Massachusett people that might mean “harvest river,” or “river that flows through meadows.”
By the time of my childhood, in the 80’s and 90’s, the meadows were mostly gone and the river had been so tamed with embankments and spillways, so constrained by yards and highways, that no one considered it a wild thing anymore. It was shallow, sluggish, colonized. Not the sort of water that held many mysteries. Though for my three brothers and me it did hold treasure. Wading there we found freshwater mussel shells (though almost never a living mussel), old bowling balls, automobile brake pads, purple patent medicine bottles, once a license plate and many times a netful of leather scrap—ancient waste from the mills that had thrived upstream.
Looking back, we probably shouldn’t have been wading. There wasn’t much alive in that river but what did survive there we found, and caught, and came to know. It set the stage for later discovery, and I see now that it also made me feel too sure of myself. By the time I brought my kids to the swimming hole in New York I didn’t think little rivers could still surprise me.
———
Out on the water a local kid floated face down over the deepest part of the pool. He looked dead but was just watching fish, wearing a diving mask. He’d told me earlier that I could borrow the mask and now I had a reason. I started for him, wading into the shallows, stepping slowly for I was barefoot and the rocks were shingled and sharp. Suddenly my four-year old leaped onto my back. I wobbled, caught myself, and tried to right his squirming, squealing weight. Then something bit me.
It wasn’t painful but it also was not the soft pucker of a goldfish. I felt sharply, assertively tasted, and I sort of leaped and yelped and almost toppled over, to the delight of my son who hooted like a cowboy. What the fuck! I said, too loudly, and then I was bitten again.
It was more of a pinch this time and still not painful, but I jumped anyway and when the sediment swirling around my feet washed downstream I saw something coiled in the shallows. It was pale yellow, wound up like a viper. For a moment I thought it was a snake and I fumbled backward in alarm. But then the thing flashed away so fast and fluidly that I knew it was no reptile. This was an eel.
———
I went briefly manic with joy. Of all eastern riverine creatures I had never seen an eel in the wild.
I shouted to Lauren. “Eels! Eels! That’s what was biting you!”
She looked up and made a face like eew. My partner looked up blankly from where she was feeding our six-month old. My other son, still on my back, had no idea what was happening, only that this was the best piggyback ride ever. I turned to the water and laughed. Then I waded in. I stuck my big toe forward, an offering, trying to lure the eel back for a closer look.
I didn’t see him again. When I finally caught up to the kid with the diving mask he was not impressed with my story. Maybe he was 10. Already he’d seen it all, at least in swimming hole terms. Yeah, he said. They hang out with the carp.
———
That night, after showers and tick-checks, I stayed up late reading about American eels. I knew they’d once been ubiquitous—thickly present in rivers up and down the East Coast—and that like many other indigenous creatures they’d suffered staggering declines under pressure from fishing, pollution, habitat destruction, you name it. But that was where my understanding fell off.
For many years I’d thought of eels as one more fading star in the constellation of native North American wildlife. So many of those stars had already blinked out, and lately I had started to notice more and more of the dark spots, the emptiness left where life had once been. Maybe it was a function of parenthood, or middle age. I had become so inured to absences that it hadn’t even occurred to me that eels might dwell in that swimming hole, living out their curious catadromous lives, waiting for some secret signal to swim back home, to the Sargasso Sea, where they would reproduce and die.
———
About a week later I told my dad the story. He laughed and said, “You know there were eels in the river behind our house.” I had not known that, and right then my mind was blown. Not once in a decade of living beside the Neponset had I ever seen an eel.
“Yeah,” he said, like it wasn’t news at all. “They lived under the bridge.”
I have still not quite recovered from this revelation. And it has strange consequences. Over the last few days I have felt the cloud of memories that is my childhood rearranging itself, pushing out at the edges to accommodate eels. This sort of thing does not happen often, not for me anyway—that memories get updated, the past gets edited, grows larger. Usually our lives go the other way. They close in.
The other thing is that, before I sleep, I find myself trying to imagine the eels now swimming into my memory. I can almost see them, feel them pushing upstream. They are silver and slimy in the moonlight. They burrow into the mud and wait. The river is no longer little but vast, linked to the sea and busy bodies. I am trying to make sense of it all. How they’d been there the whole time.