Wading

Before my father was born, his older brother, just barely old enough to walk, toddled down a fishing dock and fell into a cold Wisconsin lake. My mother’s baby big brother also toddled and tumbled, falling into a blood-warm Floridian blackwater river. My father’s family had a collie-dog named Angus who, like something straight out of a Lassie episode, went streaking into the lake and heroically dragged the child to safety. Little Uncle Tim coughed and gasped, and was once again embraced by the protective boundaries of solid land. My mother’s family, though, had a cat. Uncle Denny drowned.

My mother’s parents owned and lived in a fish-camp on the banks of the river that killed their son, and they knew that there was simply no way to prevent their other children from entering the water. Besides, my grandmother was a near-Olympic backstroker, and there was no chance, none at all, that she would deny her children or herself one of the chief joys of life. So, when my mother was born, her parents made sure she could swim before she could even crawl. My mother always swam so well that the potentially-dangerous river was far safer than any place on land. It became her home and refuge, and she spent hours in it each day, running and leaping into the warm water to escape from biting swarms of horse flies and sand gnats. She would hold her breath below the surface, only rising to gulp quick sips of oxygen, while the disappointed bloodsuckers above her boiled the air in their anger. She watched from below as they flew futilely back and forth, unable to pass through the magical boundary that separated air from water. The water protected her.

This was Florida, of course. Hurricane country. My mother loved it when the river rose above its banks and came to visit her in her house. It politely flowed over the threshold and into the living room, where it gently lapped against the cinder-blocks that my grandfather had put below his armchair. He sat in the armchair reading an Oz book to my mother, who was nestled happily in his lap. My grandmother splashed across the room to give her a fishing net, and while her father read, my mother idly dipped the net into the water, catching fish as they went swimming through the living room. Later, she waded out to rescue small animals that were crowding a tiny hillock that had been transformed into a rapidly-shrinking island. She ferried them across the water to safety on dry land. Returning, she passed the boats that her family had intentionally sunk, relying on deep water to protect them from wind and waves.

Meanwhile, my father stayed on land, traversing through the cornfields and discovering every inch of windy Midwest wilderness, accompanied first by Angus, and then by Angus Junior. He was sometimes joined by his friend Mike, and his friend’s dog Barney. Barney was a famously brave wiener dog, a dog that knew no boundaries. That was not a good thing. He would leap out of moving cars. Once, the friends went to visit the largest canyon in the midwest, and my dad was walking towards the rim when he heard the sound of running paws and panting breaths behind him. Barney ran up to the rim without slowing, and leaped into the abyss. The friends ran to the edge, and saw the tiny shining body plummet towards the river far below. He entered the water with a plop. The friends ran downstream, and saw the dog emerge from the water with wagging tail. He ran back to meet them, filled with joy.

And then my dad discovered water. He didn’t swim, but fished in every lake. Later, he spent years kayaking across Alaskan bays, hanging in clear water high above infinite shining runs of salmon streaming back towards their ancestral home, while eagles and ospreys flew around him, yelling their happiness with the world’s largess. Once, while dog-sitting for a friend’s wolfhound in a cabin deep in the Alaskan interior, he encountered a grizzly on the opposite shore of a river. The wolfhound was filled with all of Barney’s courage, and ran into the river, barking his head off at the giant bear. The bear, standing far off on the opposite shore, swiped his paw through the rapid, making a water-plume that traversed the entire stream before drenching both man and dog. The dog ran whining back to my father, and the bear began to wade across, chasing it. Thankfully, it hesitated and returned to shore, leaving man and dog to do as they pleased on their own side.

I was born deep in a southern Appalachian forest, with only one neighbor–the second-nearest was literally miles away. High in the mountains, there were no deep rivers, or any lakes or ponds. I spent my early childhood roaming the forest, perching beside waterfalls and kneeling next to tiny springs dense with salamanders, crawdads, and strange pulsing Tipulid-fly larvae with their crowns of tentacles. In the hot summer, cold would radiate up from the springs and onto my face, making me shiver.

Long before I started school, my family descended down into town for weekly swimming practice. I was as comfortable and happy inside the water as my mother was, although I had fewer opportunities to act on it. That didn’t mean, however, that I was safe from drowning on dry land. At least once a year, I’d develop a vicious sinus infection that left me coughing and gasping for weeks, drowning on my own stinking snot. One of those spells happened over my eighth birthday, and I dozed through the day sitting sick in an armchair. I didn’t notice my father and big sister quietly slipping away in the car, and I didn’t hear it when they returned half a day later. I woke up feeling something warm. Nestled down in my lap, there was a yawning collie puppy. His name was Angus the Third. I forgot that I was drowning.

Angus and I wandered the woods together. We had capital-A Adventures. Like a river, let’s start with rain. My first camping trip without other humans was on a rainy winter night, and when I opened up the sack with my camping-tarp, I realized I had forgotten the tarp-cords. The tarp had to become a blanket, and Gus and I huddled together under it through the cold wet night. Later, I was always prepared, and set up the tarp correctly, but only Gus would get any benefit from it: he had grown into a massive hundred-pound beast, and he would stretch diagonally under the full length of the tarp, leaving me curled against the edge, out in the rain. And so, when torrential rain came pounding down in the middle of a week-long hike, I decided not to mess with the tarp. There was an old stone observation tower at the top of a mountain, with a tiny cement-floored room at its base. The tower was a bit leaky, but there was a crack in the concrete that made a ridge dividing the room in two. All of the leaks were on the same side of the divide. I laid out my groundsheet and sleeping bag on the dry side, and the two of us went to sleep. Over the next few hours, as we slept, a freezing rotten lake slowly formed on the other side of the room, buoying up big islands of clustered rat turds. And then, of course, the dam was breached, and in a moment the lake flowed over to our side, soaking me, my dog, my groundsheet and my sleeping bag in icy rodent leavings. Sleep was now impossible, and I crammed soaking, fetid sleeping bag into my pack. Gus and I stumbled down the midnight trail in the rain. At first, we had a flashlight, but I had bought cheap Chinese batteries back when that meant something, and the light died within an hour. We went on, guided by occasional shafts of moonlight briefly penetrating the clouds. It rained and rained, and was probably only fun in hindsight.

But you’re not here for rain. You want deep water. Well, Angus didn’t. He loved the water with all his soul, but only to a point. He was a wading dog. Wading was his life. At every opportunity, at every river, lake, pond or seashore that he ever saw or smelled, he would bound into the water and proceed to the precise point at which the liquid touched his stomach. And that is where he’d stop. He’d wade back and forth, back and forth all day, contouring along the shoreline, always at precisely the same depth. He’d stretch his neck out to lap the water, but never let it touch his sides. Dry land bored him, but deep water terrified him: all the joy in the world was concentrated into the thin band between them. When we called for him to come back so we could go home, he’d suddenly become deaf, and I’d have to wade out and haul him in.

Of course, this led to tensions between us. My mother and I wanted to swim, and my father wanted to go kayaking, and all of this was incomprehensible and horrifying in Angus’ eyes. He would berate us roundly whenever we showed the temerity to inch a toe past the zone that he approved of. My sister would try to break the impasse by inviting Gus to go run with her, but he disdained that as the sheer idiocy he knew it was. Why on Earth would anyone run in the hot dry air when there was water to be waded in?

Later, when my family moved to a new home on a creek, Angus was in love. He would spend his days there calmly communing with the herons and other waders, but righteously admonishing the misguided squirrels and fish. Because the center of the creek was just deeper than his maximum depth, he could never venture to the other side, and he spent his days only on the left bank, like a discerning American expat in Paris. He would only leave to come wait at the top of the driveway at the end of the school day, when my sister and I would come driving home. One day, though, he was not there. My sister and I went down to the water, calling, and heard him barking on the other side. It was the middle of a drought, and the stream had shrunk until it met his exacting requirements, and he could cross. I waded across to meet him, and he came hobbling up, a massive stick protruding through his paw, almost reaching his stomach. Somehow, it had pierced a hole through the webbing between his toes. I picked up the giant dog and carried him to the car. We called ahead to the vet before we left, and when we arrived, the receptionist asked “Is this the dog with the thorn in his foot?” No, we explained, it was the dog with the stick THROUGH his foot.

Angus’ strange relationship with water came to a head at the end of another week-long hike. He was getting old, and I was just entering my prime, and I had planned a walk that had pushed him a bit too much. It did not help that it was in the middle of a hot Appalachian summer, when the humidity was so thick you could swim through it. Thick enough to drown you. On the last day, Gus was dragging himself drooping along the trail when we came to a narrow pedestrian suspension bridge across a small river, about four miles downhill from the mountain road-crossing where we were due to meet my parents. When Gus noticed the water, energy and simple joy came flooding into every crevice of his heart, and he ran to the river and planted himself in the shallows. He was where he belonged, and where he longed to be, and he would not be moved.

My parents would be coming soon, though, and there was still a four-mile uphill climb to meet them. Everyone in my family hated the very idea of cellphones, and there was no way to contact anyone about a delay. I tried to entice Gus across the river, but the water was too deep for his standards, and besides, he was smart enough to realize that the other bank only contained more trail. No worries. There was still that narrow pedestrian suspension bridge. I pried the dog out of the riverbank, and escorted him begrudgingly to the bridge. Only because he loved me, he started to cross. But the middle of the bridge was simply too much. It shaked and swayed above the abominable depths of the center of the river. In joining his fate to mine, he had clearly linked himself to a suicidally misguided fool. He would go no further. He lay down.

Well, no worries. I am named for Saint Christopher, who carried people on his shoulders across the river Jordan. I lofted Gus up and carried him to the other shore. He lay right back down again. I had transgressed beyond any conceivable bounds of reason. He would not move.

And so I picked him up once more, balanced the 100-pound dog against my already-heavy backpack, and staggered with him up the mountainside.

And then I was in college. I came home each summer to see Gus, but in my final summer, I took a job out West investigating the biology of Sequoia trees. I was riding in the back of a truck speeding down a gravel road when I felt Gus beside me. “Hi,” I said. “What are you doing here?” As soon as I could reach a phone, I called my parents. Gus had gone down to the stream one last time, and as he lay there, his blood stopped flowing. He went off wading to his final home, but, as always, he must have stayed just this side of the depths, moving along the shore until he found me. Then, he took a right turn towards the deep water, and saw all those shining salmon my father had seen streaking home. Finally, for the first time willingly, he crossed. I didn’t even have the chance to carry him across the way.