fuckatherine

As a child I held a strong fixation with the idea of superimpositions, of worlds layered upon one another. It began with the gutters, then the pipes. The drainage systems. Our row of townhouses enclosed an area of grass that sloped, increasing in intensity, into a large gravel bowl. In the middle of this little rock valley towered a hollow, screw shaped structure meant to aid stormwater management, but at the time, I could not see it as anything but a home.

On the rare occasion that the large bowl did not hold last night’s downpour, I’d slide down mud-parted fescue and venture towards the structure to knock cautiously. The sound, barely offset as echoes are, came back almost hollow, as if there were something occupying just enough space in it to absorb my greeting. I never stayed to see if there was a response.

The pipe system around this drainage pit mostly remained obediently underground. At certain strategic points around the complex the hill was permitted to open in rounded mouths, concrete maws with just enough berth for a flood rush to punch out and just enough width for a child to crawl in. I struggled to string together a mental map of their locations and spent those few hazy minutes before sleep thinking about the ways they could be connected to each other. The ways these mouths could be connected to the bowl, the house.

At some point one of the neighborhood kids lost their kitten. We could not see it but we could hear it. Desperate mewling echoed from one of the pipes. The whimpers came multiplied and omnidirectional; this solidified my theory that the pipes all conjoined to one another. We eventually pinpointed the cries to an opening that looked out above the bowl. If I were to stand at the front of the structure and look up at it from inside the ditch it appeared more as an unblinking eye than a mouth.

The kid gave me a can of tuna to place in the opening of the pipe to try and lure the kitten back out. So, fish in one hand, the other in front, I crawled into the pipe. Within a few feet, the light dropped out entirely. As did the noise. I felt around blindly, unnerved by the sudden lack of meowing. Swinging my head back to what I perceived to be forward, in the near distance, I saw a pair of eyes. The claustrophobic nature of the pipe worked fast to skew my sense of size and space, but I felt that those eyes were much too large to be a kitten.

I suddenly remembered the feeling of the almost-hollowness in the screw structure. Of occupancy. I could not shake the sensation that whatever was in front of me took up more space than it should. I backed out hastily and never ventured close again, certain for years after that there was another world below my own.

I did not understand why I’d chosen Michigan, not at least on a cold-slighting night in one of the more inconsequential summers I’ve had. Part of it must be due to the Maryland humidity -- the land here once was a swamp and refuses to let anyone forget it. But anyhow.

Perhaps “choose” is too heroic. I tinker in silence. Michigan. What else was there but big sky and big sea?

And that ocean had not even been an ocean, just water so vast I could genuinely believe it was the end of ends.

In the final Narnia installment, Caspian or Eustace or some child or another rows through a vast field of shimmering liquid, not quite freshwater and salt-like only in its resemblance to a pristine tear. Its surface appears silver-pure, marred only by the oars and body of the quietly passing voyage. I am now aware that Narnia had been some long and pronounced metaphor about Christianity and death. But at times, here namely in Michigan, I cannot help but envision the all-encompassing sea through which the children embarked on their final journey.

There is an awe that comes with such grand and unashamed water that is truly religious.

Sitting at the foot of the dunes, I trusted the expanse ahead. It seemed simple to get up, brush the sand from my crevices, and walk across the lake into the after.

And I think that’s the crux of it — the after, by which I mean the before.

Big sky and big sea. I find that increasingly these two notions are actually one and refer to my desire to be swallowed by something greater. This greater environment is welcoming yet impartial. Neither dispassionate nor impersonal, it is unbothered by my intrusion because it understands one crucial thing: a splinter can also be read as a homecoming.

It would only make sense. After all, I must return to from what I come, in essence if not in earth.

I think frequently about the Sleeping Bear Dunes story. The legend, if I recall correctly, tells of the frantic escape of a mother bear and her two cubs from a fire. The family swims across Lake Michigan but only one makes it across. When the mother treads to shore, she is greeted by nothing. Her cubs succumbed to their exhaustion some time ago: perhaps only a paw's length away, perhaps already reaching soft silt, but nonetheless gone.

Mother Bear waited and waited until she became a protrusion on the bluff itself.

Clearly, this tale harnesses all my beloved themes against me: love, death, a reclamation by the earth, Mothers. All wrapped up neatly into a dream that once might have been real.

When I said earlier that I had chosen Michigan, I too wondered if that meant that I would build a home there or if it meant one day I would find myself scouring the Petoskey lakefront for respite. Or something else entirely. Still, when I drift into sticky slumber states away, I think of the way the firs drop into sky-sea and know that I must return all the same.

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