Riverine (2 page)

The laws of thermodynamics, I would learn, deal with the concept of entropy—a measure of a system’s disorder and uncertainty. Entropy cannot decrease within any isolated system. It only shifts, like all matter, changing shape and colliding with itself. Diluting, diffusing, evaporating, and folding back onto itself. In our perfect history, junk particles from the big bang eventually become Lake Michigan, the Sahara, a field of tulips in Holland. What wonder is the order in disorder. What beauty. What certainty. A more specific definition of entropy considers the energy within the closed thermodynamic system. This energy serves as a yardstick for the disorder, where entropy is directly proportional to the energy’s heat and inversely proportional to its temperature. In our closed system, the river was the heat and the water table was the thermometer. It was a system that seemed desperate to break the boundaries of physics.

“We live in the middle?” I asked my mother.

“Technically?,” she said. “Our address is in one town, and our phone number is in the other. Pay taxes to one, and go to school in the other. It’s like not living in either town. Or like living in both at once.”

“So nobody wants us.”

I looked around, stunned by my new perspective. Most of what I saw was familiar—driveways and houses I’d seen before. These were signs of home, but I felt spat out like bad milk. And yet, I was looking at it in a new way—seeing it for the first time with the scrutiny of a stranger. It occurred to me then that this part of the map was unlike either of the pink-dotted towns. Children I went to school with did not live like us, shooting handmade weapons into the woods and wearing deerskin costumes. They were not learning Morse code or the words to Revolutionary War folk songs.

In the songs we sang, I always pictured myself as the girl waiting to be married off to a soldier or a carpenter or a sailor like some certain destiny, packaged, but unaddressed, for a future delivery date. When I was asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, I never knew how to answer. “What do you think I should be?” I would reply.

When I sketched with charcoal, I anticipated the sensation of blurring the crisp black lines into something softer, more fluid and wet-washed. When I painted with watercolors, I most often favored textures that were salt spattered or misted with water. I was engaged in an ongoing corruption of medium, and every undertaking was an exercise in thinning and thickening substances of expression until they were perfectly muddled. “Here is the fringey edge where elements meet and realms mingle, where time and eternity spatter each other with foam,” Annie Dillard writes in
Holy the Firm
. Dillard has an intimate relationship with land that shifts, with water that rises around people who can only watch and try to understand what they’re seeing. Fringe investigation was the science of my neighborhood and of my art.

Along the banks of the Kankakee, where water met the land and foam blurred the line between solid and liquid states, Wild Bill lived in a tepee.
But why?
I wondered. And from that
why
, other
whys
flowed. Why did the ice cream truck driver look relieved when we shrugged our shoulders as he drove by? Why had the river been moved? Why had anyone built a whole neighborhood in an old riverbed that flooded half the time and stunk like rot and heat all the time? More important, why did they stay there? Why did some people seem a part of the land more than others, more entwined with it?

Filled with this new view, I knew that I was neither sort, but instead some half-breed spawn of both worlds and alien to both. A bookish fishergirl who longed for the social opportunities of a cookie-cutter subdivision. When I looked more closely, I saw that Penny’s mailbox might well have been blue at one time. One day in the distant past, Penny and her man had bought a little house with a nice blue mailbox. They had planted flowers that emerged newly green from the soil each April. Once, hope had filled the emptied valley of the river’s bends.

“You shouldn’t look at it that way,” my mother said, and drove the car a little farther down the road. I looked out the back window at the river behind us, the river that, over time, would thrill me, claim me, disappoint me, and save me. It wasn’t a wavy blue line like its cartographic representation, but brown with muddy water that ran quickly westward. It gave me the sense that the water was the only thing that would ever get out of this place. And it was in a hurry to do so.

We were isolated by our coordinates, by the
where
of us. Where we lived was rural, in the broadest and most specific senses. Isolation was a measure of that fact. Our address was Rural Route 101. The in-between space on the map was a real place that had been there all along. Not unclaimed, not up for grabs, but completely inhabited by the parts of the two towns that were beyond “town limits.” Address over here, phone number over there, missing from the map. Energy contained. Separate. Because we were beyond limits, isolated and insular, rural and unclaimed, we became unassuming outlaws of sorts. We were both on the map and off it at the same time. We were the entropy of the two towns, the junk particles of the nucleus with its own status. But even so, there was a pulse that connected us, a bloodline of sorts. In our in-between-towns land, population forty, there were nights of whiskey-fueled fireside revel, when everyone sang sea shanties and knuckled washboard rhythms beneath full moons. There were archery lessons and tomahawk throws and jewelry-making lessons. There were gourd paintings and firecrackers and canoe races. There was a band of kids who swung from the thick vines that draped our very own Sherwood Forest.

Decades later, I would find that it’s in places like these that I am truly comfortable—in the square half inch of yellow paper between pink dots. The in between here and there, where damp moss grows and people sometimes live in tepees. Where a boy turns his bedroom light on and off to send an SOS signal across a small patch of grass to a lone girl who sits on a rock with a book and cannot save anyone. Where hologram children play forever and eat electric blue Popsicles and never wash their hands and sometimes spear fish with arrows. Where things stay a little bit broken. On maps, you notice, they never put a line. Between countries and states and counties, yes, but not in the yellow space between bright pink dots. But sometimes the yellow is green. Sometimes it is white. Sometimes it is brown river water, rising above the flat line of the land to prop up the identity of a tiny village.

When I came back to this spot twenty years later to see what had become of the riverbed, to see what ghosts would rise from its eroded banks, it was all still there. The road had a new name, the one-way arrow of time expanding here as it was anywhere else on Earth, but the defining entropy of the place was the same. There was no aftermath through which I could proceed as story, as I’d hoped for—no obvious tale waiting to be told. There was only stasis and the recapitulation of a contained present tense, moving toward a future that bears scars of the past. I glimpsed Earl, older now than ever, still adding scrap-made structures that outcropped around his aging trailer. Corey’s parents remained, though their little white dog was no longer yapping on the front steps and Corey himself was in a prison hours away from the river. The blue house with the accidental magenta door, where I’d lived for fourteen years, was still there, the way my father had left it when we moved. The people, the
who
of the place, still bore the unmistakable marks of rural folk—that telltale dichotomy of endurance and neglect, active and passive states happening at once.

If there was a fixed point from which every other happening here flowed, it was when the river was recoursed, its snaking dregs drawn taut in the 1800s. Beyond that, there is no single human crisis, no single lens, from which this place can be understood. “We begin with the trouble,” Kyle Minor writes in
Praying Drunk
, “but where does the trouble begin?” In my story, the uncle does not blow his brains out. He threatens to, but it never happens. And where is the story in that? “Nothing is going to happen in this book,” writes Dillard. “There is only a little violence here and there in the language, at the corner where eternity clips time.” Violence clips the corners of my past, and language sets me free.

But there is more than that. Flowers bloom and drown. Dogs die. A friend kills. The sediment is dredged for valuable metals. The water rises and recedes. Everyone hangs on, waiting for a god to deliver a life preserver or else not. A girl becomes a woman, nearly normal. Not quite. The girl, our girl, makes it out of the riverbed, but she carries traces of brown water in her lungs and sediment in her pockets so she knows the river is still there, despite all her moving on.

Notice the sand which is somehow both inside you and beneath you
.

—LORRAIN DORAN,
Phrasebook for the Pleiades

O
n Sundays during the summer of the 1991 flood, men and their cigarette smoke circled our card table, which my father had made himself with wood left over from the ongoing remodeling he did to our home. Sundays were roll-your-owns; hand-carved pipes stuffed with tobacco; squishy, pocket-sized packs of Camels; piles of Jays potato chips on the green felt tabletop next to piles of quarters and dollar bills; and cans of bronze-rimmed Stroh’s that my dad let me sip when my mom wasn’t watching.

School was about to let out. Unlike the more haphazard schedule the summer months would bring, the rhythms of my school-year days began and ended with my neighbor, Corey. In the morning, we met at the bus stop and he let me get on first. At night, after his bedroom light went out, I put his wristwatch to my ear and let its quiet tick-tock lull me to sleep. He had given it to me one night when he had stayed over. I’d been scared about a storm and held his hand to my cheek as I lay in bed. “You can have it,” he said as I fell asleep. When the water began to rise at the start of the summer, I started wearing it all day.

I always wanted a reason for the floods. I thought that they might be a sign from God, that perhaps we were suffering a punishment for the sins of our forebears or for sins of our own. During a flood, the end of times seemed to barrel toward our small enclave of riverfolk, while land beyond the floodplain was unaffected. During a third-grade field trip, I had learned about the over 800 Potawatomi who in 1839 had been marched at gunpoint from their land in northern Indiana southwest to Kansas. Our class had visited the nearby historic marshes containing the ruined ancient burial grounds of the Potawatomi and their lucrative trapping territory, and I came to believe that times of flood were the Potawatomi’s revenge. President Andrew Jackson’s Indian Removal Act of 1830 had instituted the right of the American government to negotiate land exchanges with Native American groups via treaties. Under the act, lands held east of the Mississippi by Native American tribes could be confiscated in exchange for undisclosed lands in the “west,” sight unseen. Tribes that refused to negotiate, which included the Potawatomi under the leadership of the unwavering Chief Menominee, were often forcefully removed. The Potawatomi’s violent extraction from their homeland in the Kankakee Marsh, though by comparison it was not as massive or as deadly as the more widely noted Cherokee Trail of Tears, was known as the Trail of Death.

The farmers had been gauging heavy rains for a week. They then made phone calls to those who lived in the old riverbed, or along the new river’s banks, depending on your terminology, to report on the probability of a flood. That gave the residents two or three days to prepare for the water, which the farmers had determined would surely rise. After the necessary phone calls were made, the news burning up the wires, two dozen anxious men—my usually gregarious neighbors—set their faces to stone and hauled load after load of sandbags to dam the weak banks of the young river. Their sons and daughters—including Marcus and I—watched from their porches. Someday, we would be the ones to haul the sand. We needed to know how it was done.

The men labored silently in a long line, passing the weighty bags from man to man to man like a crew of sailors loading a ship with provisions. The last man in the line threw the bag on top of the last bag until the stack was man-high. They prepared the riverbed itself first, adding height and breadth to the banks; then the crew filled the eroded hollows between the houses of the little riverside hamlet that we called home. After that was done, they helped each other secure their own homes until every home was ready to receive the rising water.

Most folks could see the river from their porches. Everyone could smell it. When a flood was coming, an ancient stench of mud and fish and scum hung in the air—the scent of the river amplified, swollen and ready to burst. The flood itself, though, the water’s tipping point, always arrived in the middle of the night.

When this one came, our phone rang around midnight on Friday. My dad put on his waders and sloshed over to his pickup truck. He pulled two more sandbags from the bed of the truck and hoisted one onto each shoulder, looking like Atlas in the moonlight to my wide eyes, and then he put them on top of the line of bags near our front door. For good measure, I guessed. Though I had the feeling that if the water got that high, sandbags wouldn’t much matter.

In a question-and-answer session after reading aloud his story “On the San Juan,” Ron Carlson addressed the topic of water shortage in the American Southwest in a way that only a writer can—with personification: “You get the sense that the heat wants to hurt you.” It was all he really needed to say. He was talking about the violence of nature. Violence like the hot, slapping hand of the sun. Violence like cracked earth and scorched vegetation, of prolonged thirst and hunger. I thought of the Kankakee and its opposite problem. I thought of the river that taunted us each year as it crept up and spilled over its human-made boundaries toward our homes. I thought of drowning, a swifter aggression than drought.