Along the deep river, coffee-colored, pitched-round with salamanders we walked. We took to the edge of the embankment, not wanting to shred her flip-flops, dampen my sneakers, or coat our sandsprayed legs in foetid grime and frog eggs. Besides, there’s all the old signs against swimming—an old chemical legacy of coke, soot, acid, bacteria together in vitriolic flourishing (my father got sick, once, swallowing creek water). Our steps are soft, measured, unsure of the weight the land will take. On tiptoes, she laughs, thinking of pandas tumbling downhill in their enclosures (some video she saw, likes to see, returning to her feed), and zookeepers wrangling their fuzzy bulk. She’s shown them to me before—their exact shape hazy. I wonder how they hold them—if those enclosures have steep sides, or deep concrete trenches ringing the outside to prevent the beast from leaping into hard-won liberty.
Maybe it’s iron bars, or thick glass a child could press their face against, an offering of sufficient solace against escape. There’s transparency in freedom, freedom in transparency—in her words we are like the bears, about to tumble over mud and root, down into the muddy depths. Swimming is its own kind of perilous freedom, I remind (the world has many kinds of freedom, both large and small.) The river’s flow is a kind of freedom.
I remember an old friend of hers, with a voice like vinegar and cherries, and the first time she saw the waterway. It was August and we were looking to escape the sweating walls of our apartments, I remember her looking out across Lake Erie and asking “Where are the waves?” Seagulls cracked their crow across the rocky beachhead. Windswept, she saw the little swells and her face was dissatisfied, sour. She spoke the language of the ocean—the language of her home. “Shouldn’t we be able to swim if those are the waves?” These were her water’s words for danger—her feet uncut by hidden zebra mussels and skin untouched by the itch of unknown concoctions boiling and driving in depths. I know these words, born forth in hot algal blooms. I had never seen the ocean, her ocean, nor could I speak its many words for danger.
Now, on silentstill banks, I scarcely know the words for river, for danger, outside of memory. Somewhere further, birdsong. No, she calls me. It’s getting dark. We should get back.
