Slip-sliding Away
On the far side of the pond bubbles braille the surface, cerulean blue, soft as morning stars. The air is still. Half light. The lilies rustle. Their posted buds stirred by a breeze of water sway like channel markers. There. Just off shore. Someone breaking fast. leisurely. Jaws worked in a whisper reaching across the silence there.
Then rolls. And dips. And disappears…
A beaver lodge stands nearby, they built this pond but that was no beaver. The texture of its fur, the shape and the way it moved. The smoothness of the dive and how the surface rose and closed, a navel of water, and what it brings to mind. That surface, opaque as skin, blind to what lies beneath.
Patience… Patience… The crease of a wake. Grainy light. No sound. The waters rake: A head appears. Oiled. Sleek. Coat as silky as a Tonkinese all umber and burnt ochre. Whiskers. Dark eyes. Fearless. That broad Boycat face so close –
And my heart leaps. And every hair is alive. I too am fearless I am soaring I see what I was sure I would never see again, a quarter century almost to the day:
We were making our way from the road down the steep banks of Herring Creek where the flood bores through the narrow. Behind us, back of the sluices, the weathered gray seine poles and the staggered fishing weirs worked by a people whose right went back a thousand years. But the herring run was over, only a few of the boney fishes swimming in place in the tidal rush, Squibnocket’s turn to pour its cup into Menemsha. The Snowy Egrets, bronzed by the shallow light had gathered in at the end of their early rising day. Black-crown Night Herons roosting in the trees were restless, preparing for their night of hunting. A changing of the guard. We’d just met, Valerie and me and I didn’t know a thing about her except that I liked her and was not sure how much she liked me. It was our first time together longer than a cup of coffee.
“Gold finch,” I said and handed her the binoculars, nodding toward to the bright yellow forms, each in pursuit of his opposite. “Osprey.” Valerie turned to follow the lead of arm. A kingfisher hovering. Swans. All the usual fare of late estuarian afternoon and then -
Round the corner of the creek one-two-three-four otters in slipstream, nose to tail, swimming with the flow. Uncaring of us and our close presence there they stopped to play not 15 feet from where we stood. Circling like dolphins, chasing the herring for the pure pleasure of it, not killing, (though they surely could if they’d wanted). And the fish off in a terror, the otters swirling and whirling in the narrow and that wallering call, “Walla walla walla walla walla walla.,” the laughter a walrus might make, so guttural, so deep for a creature so small. And all I can say is, “You’ll never see this again, this is once in a lifetime, you will never see this again. I’ve been waiting more than twenty years…”
The otter, alone and having had his look turns away, now head, now back, now tail slipping beneath. He comes up some yards off and looks again, and again dives, and surfaces. This time he has a bullfrog (the prey that brought him here) dangling from his mouth as if forgot, gaze still fixed on me, more intense than curious as if he has as much to tell as to learn. For the last time he slides below, leaving a silence so profound neither speech nor written word can ever break it, the only river otter I have seen in all that precious time, a Millennium between the then and now.
Valerie claims she knew she would marry me the first time she saw me watching her from a doorway across the room. But I know it was among the river otters, as if we were the reason of their coming and lingering and their vanishing, an arrow from the bow flying out and the arc of our lives to come.
Quo Vadimus? Will I mark the visitations of the otter as Meton marked the perfect cycle of the moon? Or like the precession of Polaris will the Return outlive all our works and days?
Life is not for the weak. Be brave.
* * *
- For Valerie, Cent’anni!
