Two Rivers

Before the flow of the river began there was a faint rainbow visible in the wake of a white wing of lakewater spurting from a port opened in the dam. Below it, at a distance, fishermen waded in knee-high boots with their sons and lures snatching up the bluegill and bass that had washed out of Percy Priest. Above there was a bridge dividing the river and the lake and the cars that drove across it were privy to the curvature of the stream as it ducked underneath the interstate overpass and the immeasurable beauty of the lake at dawn, when it seemed the sun had melted into the spangled waters with a glory nearly too radiant to behold. The wind blew amid the churn of the dam. Flocks of birds at play in the surf. He stood in the grass and watched them for a while. Leadeth me beside the raging maelstrom. Upon a wooden bench in the field were etched old carvings, messages, signatures. "NO FATE", one says. More still were spray-painted under the overpass, where the trail just begins. Cave drawings, hieroglyphs in vibrant graffiti advertising assorted artistry and gang signs and lovebirds whose initials were dated and framed in a heart. They were records of past travelers jammed in a tight canvas below the road which roared with the engines of speeding semi trucks. A steep hill climbed toward it of big rocks and boulders that he had to resist the urge to scale every time he walked by. And it was often that he did. He'd memorized the concrete pillars that upheld the interstate bridge and the brown discolor about their legs from where they waded in the river, demarcating the levels of the water. Once he saw it so high it had spilled over into the trail and closed off its passage. The rain had been hard, constant, and the dam had had its valves unleashed. And that was only a shadow of how high it had climbed in the past, as the clay staining on the boulders could attest to. High enough to have flooded all the nearby condominiums and instilled in their occupants a lingering fear of its return.

There had been floods and droughts between them, an ebb and flow incarnated by the river and the lake behind it. The man-made river. The trail man-made too, like a line drawn in concrete tracing the banks. It was cut through the land and paved and fenced by the city governance for its people to enjoy. An arterial circuitry interconnected throughout the metropolitan expanse. He wanted one day to walk its entirety and loop back around to the beginning. But of course he hadn't. Much of what he wished to do he never got around to doing. He was a being of thought over and above action. His current, if it could be called as such, was a thin and slow rivulet whose straight edge was hampered by a deficit of momentum. That was why he came out there as regularly as he did. To stop, to think. In the warmer months, when it was convenient, he'd make the trek once a week. One August that was wracked in a nation-wide swelter like a moist blanket overlaying everything. Your arms practically swimming through the vapor and the sizzle upon the concrete on the road ahead mirage-like and vague. It was hot then. Hot even for a southern summer, yet he was there bathing in his sweat. That sulfuric fart stink of city runoff, city water baptizing the trail.

There were sweet spots in the fall or early spring, when all you might need was a jacket. The wind countered the sun's heat in a comfortable equilibrium that felt a delicate balance was struck, rare and begging to be enjoyed. It was the magic hours right before a storm that he enjoyed most. The slight electricity in the air. Grey torsional cloud coverage and aggressive winds. The trees danced and rattled with the frequencies that seemed everywhere, and there was no presence of the sun that it might intrude with sweat and sunburns and eye-blinding brightness. It seemed to give energy, excitement, rather than siphoning it out of you. As though God were closer somehow, and the danger of it enticing. 

The boughs of the trees would curve inward and form a rough tunnel with their fingers loosely interlocked as a canopy shading chiaroscuro patterns on the road. The treeline on the riverbank stood often strangely turned away from the water, while their brothers on other side reached endlessly toward the current. One early in the trail had been long dead and rotted, its stomach opened up and empty. Black, its bottom an ashtray filled with trash and leaves and powdered dirt sheaves of itself. Human detritus was everywhere. No corner left without the sure markings of civilization to break the tenuous illusion of the surrounding natural world, if it were possible to maintain at all. More a facsimile of nature. There were beer cans half buried in mud and spiderwebs of fishing line tangled on every other tree branch and tied bags of dog crap hanging a gaudy florescent blue. Better up there and bagged than smeared putrid on the road as landmines you'd avoid to your peril. It was inevitable with the cadre of dogs that filled the road, not quite matching the ranks of humanity but edging close. Some friendly, others reticent and stalwart. There was a small park dedicated to them at the trail's mouth where many joyous pups leapt for tennis balls and frisbees while their owners shaded under benched awnings. He looked upon them with jealousy, or if not jealousy then a kind of nostalgic yearning. For childhood friendships that were stronger than any iron sharpened by human bonds, of a boundless and devoted love like he had never known since. There was little stopping him from getting another of his own, little except for his own unyielding trepidation and worry that were powerful enough to talk him out of anything. A complacency in the unfulfilled longing, a comfort in that pain.

The experience was a particular mixture of seclusion and camaraderie. To be alone on the trail and yet surrounded by others. From the fishermen on the banks that would hardly acknowledge your existence to the ever-present cars in the not too distant milieu of the city. There were your fellow walking itinerants that you'd pass and avert your eyes to not make it awkward and in doing making it exponentially so. He was a slow walker, and had learned to check often behind him to see if any runner or cyclist were nipping at his heels. Always there was someone on the road, at least a few to stave away the pervasive isolation that he was well acquainted with. As though it were chasing him, or perhaps him chasing it. Quality time alone with the trees and the river and the bugs. Gnat-clots floating in middair, directly at eye level. Swerve your neck to dodge them. At one stretch, where the trees are particularly tall and straight, a broken bough hung suspended like mother nature's own chandelier. Wracked and throttled by wind and storms and floods. A fork in the road offers two options: the left path that cuts straight and unsullied through some high, dense foliage; the right which dips low to water level and is pock-marked by mud and washed up debris from the flooding that engulfs it if there's been too much rain. The right is better. More shaded and cool and scenic, but the choice is more often left up to the clouds. Reverb from a hurricane three thousand miles southwest might have more say. 

Alone and not alone. That was the constant refrain in him, the stone that fell and rippled the waters. Disturbed, agitated. Like the presence of small wildlife just out of view in the brush. Always knowing they were there but never meeting eye to eye. Some creature that looked like him, walked like him, but was more a mere shadow whose incomplete mimicry was nearly an insult. In the enclosing trees and the bodies of water, the almost dried gully underneath a short walkway that seemed less a creek and more a moat dug into a mass of mud and clay. A dead tree collapsed into it and the green standing water barely moving. He knew loneliness well, knew it like a phantom brother. It was there with him on the road. It could even be said he went there to greet and walk with him in the day. The second river to parallel his own, smaller and darker. A river that would accompany him when all others fell by the way, a friend born from subtraction and vacancy. 

The trail eventually threaded through the back of his old high school, that monolithic fortress populated by countless memories and ghosts. Some part of him was still there, the angry teenager of those four years. Where he first really met solitude. Coming as a friend's offered hand while he was lost in the overcrowded mire of fellow hormonal sociopaths all shuffling in a state-mandated file. Turning inward, building a carapace of silent detachment to protect against bullies and frustrated emotions with nowhere to go. He hoped to have evolved since then, to have grown into a healthy and flourishing adult, but in his heart he knew the answer. Not nearly enough. 

A golf course bordered this part of the road and he walked it as it climbed a hillock where there were nets set up for, oddly, another kind of golf. He had to on one occasion narrowly side-step a spinning frisbee that glided across the field. It didn't go in its intended net, as he recalled. Here were people seemingly everywhere. As numerous as the trees. The path took you to a park with multiple playgrounds for children and picnic tables. Memories he had there too, though they were fewer and more amorphous in his remembrance. He had the acute sensation that he belonged to this land, that it was in his bloodstream. The sights and sounds and smells. Low boughs of magnolia trees and their thick, peachfuzzy leaves. The skatepark he only observed from a distance and the big always half-empty parking lot belonging to the water park he almost drowned in once. An oft-repeated tall tale among others intertwined with the land's own history. The rivers braided and impossible to separate. More legends of tornadoes and flooding here at the epicenter of his adolescence, or something near it. 

At last was the mother, the river called Cumberland. Not the actual the end of the trail, it forked and ran many more miles after, but this a natural conclusion. Crossing the great pedestrian bridge with its high arches and cables suspending the concrete over the stillness of the water. Always strangely calm, above on the supported concrete amenity. The sun setting to the left, to the west and the sky blushing with the squinting horizon. At peace. The end of the bridge is marked by a plaque dedicating the bridge and a piece of art as some kind of monument to the working-class people of the city. There he stopped, waited, breathed. To remind himself to be thankful, yes thankful most of all. For the road and the trees and the river, for the people and the grass and the dam standing at the journey's beginning and end. The breath of God in them each and every one. Then he turned to go back the way he came, such is life in constant motion