Ripples

                                                                                                                         Kendra Vanderlip

                                                                                                                         Word Count: 562

 

Write a 500-600 word experiment inspired by three things of your choice (three significant bodies of water).

 

 

Lake Michigan will always feel like home — the way the waves pull on my toes as I sink into the murk of the lake bottom, how the aquatic plants drag on my calves in an effort to root me. Sitting at the edge of a family cabin dock, I watch the sunset in front of me, vivacity fading as the wildlife in the woods behind me starts to stir. A deer and her fawn walk cautiously through the yard, stopping to chew on the piles of clover in their path, while the porcupine that lives in the trees next to the cabin slaps his briny tail, an immediate fading echo, trying to warn me back into the safety of enclosed spaces.

 

Sailboats and piers disappear into the falling night, a moving panorama like the final seconds of a movie. When it’s over, I sit in the melancholy, bug droning filling the humidthick air around me, coaxing lost memories as the waves lap on the edges, pushing me further into the darkness.

 

*

 

The Mississippi River is the closest thing to a lake in Memphis. I take the ferry tour there four times, entranced in the power the river seems to carry with it. The air on the river has a grit to it, a freshness that pushes all the other air out of my lungs. An older man with a goiter on his neck is the tour guide. He talks about how the river ate old forts when the white colonizers tried to build them on the banks, and how the flooding of the river in Arkansas created some of the most fertile land in the country. I peer over the edges of the white ferry as I grip my little plastic cup of overpriced wine, white liquid swaying in time with the boat. The large paddleboat wheel steering under bridges and downstream in a well-practiced loop, while the dark waters of the Mississippi churn beneath in pensive passing.

 

Each time I ride the ferry, I’m searching for a calmness.

 

Each time I leave it, I’ll find myself wishing I could spend longer circling on the water.

 

*

 

Maybe here is where my fascination with water started, at the Fish Ladder attached to the Grand River in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Here, I remember the serenade of rushing waters after a rain fall, the battering of fish as they jumped up the water covered cement stairs to travel to the Great Lakes, where they would spawn and swim out to repeat the cruel passage again and again.

 

 

An understanding of a universe below her feet—

a child and her father

draped over the cracked and chipped walls,

celebrating the bloody trials of fish below them.

 

I’ll visit the Fish Ladder two more times in my adult years, trying to understand the magic buried there, but it won’t seem magical anymore, the wooden bars that keep people safe broken down and splinter rough. I’ll try to remember the magic from my childhood as I visit once with my father, when he’s the healthiest he will ever be, and three years later, after he’s left the world. I’ll walk through the cobwebs of the structure, listening to the rushing waters for a memory, finding them less boisterous then I remember, draped over the edges looking for a ghost in the white churning waters below me.

Comments

  1. Jordan FloydAugust 26, 2020 at 1:41 PM

    I really love the moment at the end, Kendra, where you use line breaks. It's such a good moment and image, and these lines really stand out: "An understanding of a universe below her feet...celebrating the bloody trials of fish below them."

    ReplyDelete

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