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The Embodiment of Applause
As the weather raged, I journaled about a trip we’d taken to Camp Ocoee the week before. I had stayed in the car while Jim gassed up at Cherokee Corners, studying how the late-day sun had its way with the grassy fields; how it made the Queen Anne’s Lace at the road’s edge glow. I wanted to try to record that particular quality of light as the cloud towers built in the distance, raising their boiling heads toward heaven. While I studied the pebbled whiteness of the spindly plants, something called in the distance—a goose or a dog with an odd bark, maybe, or a man gone crazy with grief. Only the deepest pain would have made a human run out into the afternoon and scream at nature like a howling animal, I thought, realizing as this popped into my head that my imagination was growing overactive in my pursuit of material. As soon as the admonishment sprung to mind, it occurred to me that to make a judgment like that was ridiculous because using the imagination was the purpose of being creative, especially for a writer!
I was thinking about this as I drove along the beach road the next morning—protected from the suffocating humidity by the whirr of the air conditioner. The waves of heat radiating from the hood and the memory of Queen Anne’s Lace brought to mind another time when scorching temperatures and these leggy plants were fused in the experiential. A field of the “weeds,” as the United States Department of Agriculture classified them, had stretched out for about a quarter of a mile behind our house when I was a girl. I sometimes walked up to its edge and marveled that something considered a blight could produce such graceful Victorian-esque blooms.
I watched one day as they bowed their heads, wilting in the mid-day light right before my eyes. I understood—the air felt like a furnace as I turned away to trudge toward the library with my little sister in tow. When we reached the spot where the Hosely’s creek gurgled beneath the road, we looked longingly into the rushing water but knew we’d be in major trouble if we ruined our clothes so we kept moving, slogging on toward the elementary school to see what books were on the shelves. The antiquated air conditioning in the library provided little relief as we searched the rows of fiction for books to take home, and it wasn’t until we’d returned to the dark coolness of our house with all the shades drawn that we’d felt the relief of being chilled to the bone by air conditioning that actually made a difference. I recalled how the covers of the books we’d carried home were soaked with our perspiration as we tossed them onto the kitchen table. I liked this memory because it was one of my first recollections as to how much books had meant in my life. The sacrifice of making my way through stifling heat to find new inspiration had been well worth the effort.
On that hot Florida morning, I sat in the car lost in thoughts of that far-away time for only a few minutes after the air conditioning had quieted, the memories falling away as I realized I was suffocating. I roused myself from my reverie and hurried out of the car in order to begin closing the condo, as we would be relinquishing the oceanic air for that special brand of Chattanooga humidity. We were returning home that afternoon to prepare for our first trip to South Dakota, and I dreaded it, a fact that made me feel guilty and sad.
Once home, Chattanooga was living up to my memories and there was only one outdoor spot that afforded a dependable escape from the heat: the screened porch. I spent most of my mornings there and had decided it was the perfect place to entertain. We had invited our next-door neighbors for dinner, and they remarked that we’d found a great spot on the bluff as we settled into the comfortable furniture. As the breezes flowed up the mountain, the talk turned to our work in Costa Rica and South Dakota as it always did with people in our lives. Jim mentioned a mutual friend, a dentist, who had just returned from Haiti with a strain of incurable malaria. The conversation lulled for a few moments as Walter, a doctor, closed his eyes. When he opened them, he said, “I don’t think I can imagine doing that. I could not put myself in such a situation as I’d have to choose between myself and myself.”
The astuteness and raw honesty of his comment ricocheted through my brain. I spent a great deal of time thinking about this as the days rolled along, dawning murky most mornings as the sun sparred with fog to gain a foothold in our patch of sky. The dampness of those precious mornings made me hug my cup of coffee close to my chest as I stood at the edge of the screened porch watching the mist play with the leaves on the trees. They flapped like the rotor blades on helicopters, the constant movement reminding me of how applause would look if the sound were made physical. What would the leaves be applauding? I wondered. Certainly not the choices I’d made…
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A Gritty Song
I had stocked up on Dramamine because I’d just had my first bout of seasickness during a fishing trip with Jim, the nine-foot swells in the Gulf of Mexico making me want to toss my toenails. I wasn’t much for fishing, hating the fact that it must have hurt like hell when a hook entered the gullet or the outer rim of a fish’s bony lip, but I did love to eat fresh seafood so I went along, making do with taking notes about the cruelty of it all in my writer’s notebook. I did have to admit there was something graceful about the act of fishing, the caster’s shoulders flexing when the line unfurled, the reels singing a gritty song, and the lures striking the black surface of the choppy ocean with a plop.
I wondered if the view the fish had as they contemplated the lure was akin to peering through gray/green water glass. Was it the murkiness of their world that fooled them into thinking the contrivance they were about to devour was sustenance? The foam that floated past as I lounged on the front of the boat was like spittle on the face of an elderly man whose expression had gone slack, though this unfathomable water presented a countenance closer to the face of a poker player—so much activity beneath the surface kept secret by the mind willing it not to show. The oyster beds drew black lines on the horizon—dark as India ink—and buoys and fishing boats pocked the water as far as the eye could see. One mound of shells was like a dark pillow continually gathering sand to soften its entry into the water. Nearby a lone leafless tree seemed so forlorn as it spread its arms to the sky, begging for a mirroring stripped-down lover to echo its hapless shape. Did it curse the fact that it landed in such an isolated place?
Jim was the first to pull a fish from the water, its vacant eyes disguising the turmoil its gasping mouth and trembling fins betrayed. Was it wondering what explosion had hit its soggy world to cause such an upheaval into what must have been a painful deluge of light? Its luckier water mates hid out in the leaden liquid filled with marsh grasses that segued to a dusty green shelf of mangrove. As we made our way from the ocean into a wide creek, foamy blankets of Milfoil swayed with the movement of the water near the jagged banks, unfathomable as it ate the light that might have penetrated to the creekbed. We crept into the channel just as dusk’s light was purpling the surface of the water. Stumpy palmetto palms craned their bushy heads skyward, native-like and curious, they seemed to furtively peek from the grassy beds, some leaning precariously to one side while the others listened for noises in the opposite direction.
Snowy egrets were stark against the deep-coated world as if announcing their greatness by flashing their wings—the pristine hues of their feathers catching bits of illumination. I watched a giant pink sun sink below the line of the world’s edge as a frog began its honking, inspiring the entire amphibian nation to follow suit. They were so boisterous they could have been a flock of geese camping in the midst of the tall grasses, and I wondered how large a frog would have to be to make such an impressive sound.
The next day I sat as morning awakened and marveled at the calmness of the water surrounding the house—there wasn’t even the tiniest ripple in sight. Birds twittered, and just as I thought about how the world was softly silent, a pine tree beside the porch creaked as if to prove me wrong, then someone cranked the engine of an airboat across the marsh. It sounded like a giant mosquito buzzing around in the humid air. A second boat geared down on the river as the water mirrored the sky’s baby blueness, the reflection of marsh grasses turned upside down as stem met stem, connecting twin opposites on the surface of the river. These thick-haired grasses held froths of white flowers, each delicate like a pin on a jaunty beret that would have been right at home perched askew on a young girl’s head.
We were back on the water by mid-morning and as we approached Deer Island, the throaty grinding of the boat motor was the only sound reverberating in the hot, damp air. I tried to imagine how it would feel to be driftwood and realized that being blown into the ocean would likely be the perfect version of a nightmare—the water incessantly lapping at the skin, raw and exposed to the morning sun, which only added insult to injury. The waves would eat at the flesh, polishing the dermis to a stony smoothness. My view from my prone position would be water lapping up and over my eyes as the tide filled my world with nothing but liquid, a flood of color as murky as the feeling emanating from my abandoned heart. Grasses would drift onto my torso and rest like dark scars as the high tide receded, taking with it all the choking I had been forced to endure while the water entered every fissure it was slowly creating.
That evening, I sat on the deck of the couple’s waterfront home, enjoying the quiet as the sky deepened, attempting to record everything about the trip that I’d found interesting. Darkness was grabbing at my pen and paper, so I had to write as quickly as possible as night ushered in the cool air. A cricket called from the flowerbed as the breeze stirred the ferns above the water that rippled past. A dark cloud was skulking toward me from the west and I had to squint to see the words I was recording as its front edge reached me, further muting the light. Wind chimes made far-too-happy sounds as I raced to get my reactions to the watery world in which I’d been immersed on paper. I’d never noticed how the tinkling of the hollow metal mimicked china teeth chattering on a winter morning. I looked up as something skirted past my peripheral vision to see a small black bat flutter against the charcoaled sky. In relief it was quite outstanding and I watched as it pirouetted in the last bit of light that oozed from the far horizon. Suddenly the dark consumed it and me; I put down my pen and rested in the chair in secrecy, the words I’d so desperately wanted to put on the page invisible in the inked evening.
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