On pain and tragedy and beauty and life on the river.

I moved to this little cottage for a one-year experiment in country/river’s edge living. Actually, I had set myself the even shorter challenge of staying at least six months. Sticking it out for six months was going to be my minimum goal to count the experiment as a success.

Four years later, I’ve learned a thing or two. For one, I love this place. I’m not necessarily “in love” with it as I was for the first year or two, but I do still deeply love it. It is a relationship, me with this cottage on the river. We’ve had our ups and our downs, this place and I.

There are unexpected challenges to living here. So much of what I love, the beauty of being so close to nature, carries with it the constant potential for tragedy. Just last week I saw again the red fox that I’ve so enjoyed watching as she raised her yearly den of kits in a ditch pipe along one of the county roads. I’ve been worried about those kits because I’ve had to stop for them more than once driving home at night. Today I saw the adult fox dead on the side of the road. God damn. Humans cause so much death out here. Are her babies grown enough to survive alone yet? I hope so.

I think we are probably the worst of what nature has to offer.

And I’ve seen a human die here, too.  The winter of 2014, I saw a man drown in the cold, rushing waters of the Flatrock. I had watched this guy acting peculiarly in the woods across the river. Shouting, walking up and down the hills, falling down. Then I saw him down by a canoe that had sat down by the river unused for the two years I’d lived there. I’d wondered several times how that canoe managed to stay there, close to the river, and not get carried away in a flood. But it hadn’t and now that goofy-acting man was over near it.  And I was worried. I knew no one could get a canoe safely into the river at the speed it was flowing on that sleeting December day.

I went to my computer and sent a Facebook message to the canoe owner across the river. Then I walked back into the kitchen and looked out again. The guy was in the river, in the canoe, and in water up to his midsection. The canoe had swamped immediately. I called 911. 

“Some dumbass has put a canoe in the river and now he’s in the water. There’s no way he can get it out of there.  He’s headed to the dam in Geneva” I told the operator. But by the time I hung up, and in one of those very clear moments that you later wonder how you managed, I realized the police couldn’t possibly get there in time to save him. That the water was too cold and he’d have hypothermia very quickly, that I couldn’t reach him because he was across the river, but that maybe I could drive to the end of my road, race down to the river and yell at him to grab something. I knew that he could not be thinking clearly and maybe not thinking at all. I thought if I could yell at him and maybe shock him into clarity, I could show him where he could grab something and maybe he’d be able to get out of this.

So, I did that. I put on my shoes, grabbed a coat and got in my car, drove as fast as I could to the end of the road. I was thinking I’ll get Chuck out of his house and he’ll help me and maybe we can hold out a big branch or something. But I knew when I got out of my car that there wasn’t time to get help from Chuck. 

I heard the guy in the river yelling: “Help. . .Help”. I ran down the hill toward the water and saw his head bobbing above the current as he rolled along with it. I shouted “I’m here” as I ran down the hill. And then he went under. And he didn’t come back up.

A few other people came out of their homes within a few seconds but we couldn’t see him. He was gone.

The police came and someone said there were TV trucks on the bridge at Geneva and I should go tell them what I saw, but after I talked to the police I went home. I knew that if someone had seen my son drown and didn’t save him I would hate that person. It wouldn’t matter that there was nothing that could be done. I wouldn’t ever forgive someone who hadn’t saved my son. And I just couldn’t bear knowing I’d be the person his parents hated.

Months later they found his body. In the meantime I learned that he wasn’t a good guy. Convicted child molester. But, as the police detective said during the second phone call he made to me to ask again about what I’d seen, “he was still someone’s son.”

Ugh. Yes. I saw someone’s son die in that river I love. He had been looking for his white pit bull in the woods before he got in the water. They found the dog the next day.

That winter was hard. Isolated. It was beautiful and frosty outside. I didn’t want to be here. In the spring they found his body just around the bend from where I saw him go under.

The next year I decided to spend winter in the city, rented a house from a friend and left the river behind. I missed it, but not enough to stay even for a weekend.

But when I came back in the spring. I knew I loved it again.  There’s still tragedy here, but there’s tremendous beauty, too. And a chance to see and be part of life --- and death --- in ways I never experienced in the city.

We’ve weathered bad seasons, this little cottage and I. We’re no longer in the budding of our love affair. The bloom is mature. We’ve been through some shit.  But again this year as I returned home from winter in the city, the beauty of all there is here outside my door has me happy again that I’m back.

I don’t know how long I’ll stay at this little house on the river. It’s not a good place to be disabled or old, or tender-hearted. But it is a good place to be me for now.  For my soul for now. And for now I’m staying.