Where the River Ends - Charles Martin [8]
Given its tea coloring, the St. Marys is called a blackwater river. Two hundred years ago, sailors used to venture into the Cumberland Sound and run upriver some fifty miles to Trader’s Hill, filling their casks to overflowing because the tannic acid kept the water potable for long periods—like transatlantic voyages.
In times of drought, the St. Marys River can be a few inches deep and a few feet across. At its headwaters in Moniac, it can be little more than a trickle. But prolonged rains—the lifeblood of the swamp—can swell the river’s banks, closer to the ocean, to more than a mile wide with “holes” thirty or forty feet deep. Normal flow rate might be a half a mile an hour, while flood flow might be as much as six or eight. Maybe even ten.
Flooding here is a sneaky thing. When it floods, it does so from the ground up. Because the rain comes in from other places, the water rises beneath your feet without warning. One minute you’re asleep, moon bright, not a cloud in the sky with the bank sitting thirty feet from your tent. Six hours later, you wake to find your sleeping bag soaked and your tent three inches under water. Floods here don’t fall down around you. They rise up beneath you. Out of nowhere.
Folks who live on the river usually ask two questions before building a home: where is the hundred-year flood plain and how do I build above it? Given that no insurance company in its right mind will write flood insurance for the St. Marys Basin, most homes are built on stilts.
Even the churches.
Despite this, the banks are dotted with homes, fish camps, swimming holes, marinas, rope swings, zip lines, whiskey stills, mud bogs and even one well-hidden nudist colony. Activity bustles along the banks like ants beneath the surface of their hill. From headwaters to sound, she is one of the last virgin landscapes in the South.
THE RAIN HAD SLOWED ME to a crawl so I pulled off beneath an overpass and pushed the stick into neutral. Abbie lay in the back, half asleep. Every few minutes she’d mumble something in her sleep that I couldn’t understand.
The treatments are the worst. They whittle away at your core, strip you of everything and leave you with fleeting memories. She’d tried so hard for so long to hold on, but like water, it had slipped through her fingers.
I crawled into the back of the Jeep and lay down next to Abbie. She curled inward toward me. I pulled the plastic bag holding the yellowed and wrinkled newspaper article from my shirt pocket. I’d learned a few years ago to use whatever I could to stoke her hopes—keep her thinking out beyond the present moment. Because if she concentrated on the here and now, she’d spiral down fast. It was how I’d learned to get here from there to here.
Her eyes cracked long enough to recognize it. She smiled and nodded—meaning she’d play along. “I’d like to…” The whisper was hoarse and distant. It was the drugs. Her pain threshold was rather high. She’d had a lot of practice. Her face told me she was fending it off as best she could.
Abbie had always suffered with migraines. She internalized most everything, and in her case the tension had to go somewhere. Maybe her dad had something to do with it. They came on quickly and left slowly. By the time we met, she’d tried a dozen different medicines, yoga, acupuncture and deep-tissue massage, but all with little to no relief.
When we were alone, she’d place my index finger just above her ear. That was Abbie-speak for “Trace me.” From her temple, my fingertips followed the lines of her ears and neck, her collarbone, the rise and fall of her breast, her arms, wrist, fingertips, the mound of her hips, the descent of her thigh, the little knot on her knee, the curve of her calf and the arch of her foot. Often, she’d fall asleep and when she woke the migraine was gone.
I traced her.