Three Water Stories

1.
I am staying for a few days on a Southern mountain. On the north side of the camp site a little stream flows by, breaking first in a small waterfall just steps away from the path that leads me to it. Someone--the previous tenant, I imagine--left two bottles of liquid soap beside the stream, and that makes me realize that it's the perfect place to bathe and so I do just that, usually once in the dusk of early morning and again in the dusk of nightfall, washing myself in the chill water of the mountain stream. I scrub with goat's-milk soap, pour stream water over my hair, and brush my teeth there too, although for that, I use drinking water I carried down from camp. By the time I am finished there is no sign I have been there, the water flows so quickly and scrubs itself clean so thoroughly. On the second day, and every day after that, I am joined by a large crawfish who slowly negotiates the slippery rocks across the stream from me. I am leery of him at first, but later think that he will likely avoid me--you don't get to be that big as a crawfish, I reason, without figuring out to stay away from what might eat you. Buck comes to stand beside me while I bathe and we watch the creature together. Its mossy reticulated tail splays out like feathers making it look, for all it is Earth-bound and water-bound, as though it is still perfectly capable of flight.

2.
In late March I wrote about sitting on a flat rock beside the river, wrote about sitting there with a friend in the hot spring sun. When I wrote about it the sun was still low and cool in the sky, the river rocks were still draped with ice, and the friend existed mostly as a hope in my imagination and in reality, several hundred miles away. But last weekend that friend and I--lovers now--held hands as we walked down to that same spot where I had imagined us a season ago and stood on the rocks where the river bends itself alongside the road. By now the water is slower and diminished: like much of the rest of the country, we're hard in a drought this year. The dog was with us, and he waded in the shallow water while Buck turned over rocks and examined their undersides for mayfly nymphs, the sign, he says, of a healthy stream. The rocks were squirming with them, the stream is healthy despite the drought, and along the banks the wild roses and the chokecherries rioted: life, they insisted, life. We walked back up and stood on the bridge, looking down at the water to see if any fish were lazing there. We saw one, and then crossed to the other side. There were no fish there, but resting on the river bottom was the bleached exoskeleton of a large crawfish, looking impossibly calcified, white and annealed, perfectly preserved. It was that or it was a trick of the light, but we both saw it, and spent a long time staring down at it as at a relic from another time, as though we were contemplating the bones of some drowned saint, or the ossified proof of an earlier holy moment that had passed between the two of us.

3.
On the last morning we spent on the mountain, I sat drinking coffee as the sun began, belatedly, to break over the hill; and I saw that first its light, and then the shapes of the trees, and finally the whole rest of the sky itself, were reflecting in my coffee cup. I began to scry, swirling the coffee first this way and then that way. It's a subtle art, scrying, and something I want to be good at but understand only imperfectly. Here is what I saw: first alliums appeared, and although I do not know what they mean, I do know that the next garden I plant, alliums will be the first thing I plant. When the alliums disappeared the body of a crab emerged, and after a moment I thought it was an allusion to the month of July, season and home of the zodiac crab. Again, I do not know what it means, but think to myself that by summer's end I will know, given the way that lately, things just seem to need a little time in order to wiggle out from the imagination and begin drawing their first breaths in the inhabited world.