A Fear of the Dark and other stories
by
John G. Paterson
North Door Books
St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada
Published by John G. Paterson at Smashwords
Copyright 2010 John G. Paterson
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A FEAR OF THE DARK AND OTHER STORIES
in memory of my father
Robert C. Paterson 1922-2000
Where the fear, there is your task! - C.G. Jung
contents:
A Fear of the Dark
Tide Out
The Midnight Shift
English Weather
Oak Trees
Nightmare in the Orchard
A London Birthday
A FEAR OF THE DARK
1979
In the fresh pine air of the evening Mark sits on the porch and watches the lights come on in cottages and farmhouses across the lake. The lights flicker at the edge of the far shore from the air rising above the warm water. Insects sing with intensity as stars, one at a time, pop through the darkening blue sky.
Just after supper Harry and Sheila drove over to Lumensville, ten miles away, to visit Sheila's aunt and uncle. They left Mark at the cottage to wash the dishes and do some reading.
Jessie, the girl who they introduced him to that summer, has not yet arrived. But, after all, her promise to do so had been qualified. ("If I can get away.")
He would have gone across himself to meet her if she had not said she might be coming. He prefers she come over to him. That way he would have her to himself and would not have to share her company with her parents. Now he can only sit in the fading light and wonder what she is doing at that moment.
He has not known her for long; she still represents something of a mystery to him. There remains the excitement of discovering new things about her. On the other hand, he does not like the sense of uncertainty about getting to know someone new. He feels a need to make things clear, to define his relationship with her, to become intimate and erase all areas of tentativeness and formality.
Maybe I'm this way because so many things in my life now are uncertain, undefined, without connection, he thinks. Up in the air. As this last thought enters his head, another star pops through the sky.
He is twenty-five years old this year and has just completed his first year teaching high school mathematics. He did not like the high school, or the apathetic students, and felt like an uninspired babysitter for most of his time in class. He discovered his idealism about education was shallow. He had hoped to make a difference to his students—but now that he didn't, he realized that it didn't matter after all. The bright ones went their own way without his help; the others passed their time in class, eager to get out at the end of the day.
Harry and Sheila, who are teachers with him at the same school, are much more suited to the struggle of teaching city children knowledge they try their damnedest to resist. Sheila, the more cynical of the two, does not like teaching as much as she did when she started; she thinks she might be nearing a burnout, especially when she catches herself talking about turning some of her students over to Guatemalan death squads, or to Islamic courts:
"There should be a law that allows us to cut their hands off at the wrist if they don't turn in their assignments."
Mark puts his foot on the wooden rail of the porch and leans back in his chair. The bullfrogs make an enormous noise in the bulrushes. Mating calls, he thinks to himself. The cottage is close enough to the lake for him to hear the waves lapping against the shore. Harry's motorboat hits the wooden dock with a slow beat of the drum. Mosquitoes buzz inches from his face, unable to penetrate the Insect Off, a smell that mixes with campfire smoke in his clothes.
Harry bought the cottage a couple of years ago, and on long weekends and summer holidays spends his time making endless repairs on the rundown shack. He plans to build two more cottages on this property and make some money on his investment. Harry, unlike Mark, is a perfectionist, forever enthusiastic about new projects and careful to follow them through to completion, even if they bore him in the end. Sheila teases her husband about his "compulsive" behaviour—although she confessed to Mark that Harry is very useful if she wants to get something done. She sets him on track and then follows his industrious pace.
A motorboat is puttering along the far shore of the lake. The beam of a fisherman's flashlight reveals its location. The idea of night fishing makes Mark uneasy, although Harry did take him out once—but only after exhausting Mark's reluctance. Mark did not like the darkness of the water, the boat gently rocking on an immense darkness with the dark forest to the north of the lake where few cottages stand. For him the darkness took on a metaphysics that he could not understand and did not want to understand.
Harry assured him that coming out at night on the water was the best way to see the stars. The sky, with its depth and vast number of stars, surprised Mark after living all his life in the city. But its unwelcome clarity of vision was more a terrifying mystery than a revelation. A dark field of blazing, unknown worlds.
Mark is afraid of the dark, and has been for as long as he can remember.
"Nyctophobia! Interesting" was all that Sheila said when Mark confessed his neurosis to her late one night.
"When I'm outside at night," he said, "I feel anxious. I fear something out there in the grasses, or in the bushes. Evil spirits. And sometimes I feel waves of panic begin to wash over me, slowly flowing through me, although it never comes down to losing control."
"Losing control," said Sheila. Mocking him, or showing sympathy?
Where does such a fear come from? Is it genetic? Or does it come from some childhood experience? He asks himself these questions as he sits on the porch. Sheila had only said it was interesting, meaning she did not find it very interesting at all. Besides, she had other things on her mind that night. Even so, her insensitivity brings back a tiny pain to him. His fears all sounded so childish when he spoke them out loud. He should have said nothing.
Yet he still feels there is some significance to his fear, a significance connected to the deepest Africa of his childhood.
He is not able to remember if he had a very happy childhood or not. How can a childhood be thought of as happy or unhappy? As a child he never questioned his state of being. Things then were just as they were, not open to examination. He can still remember crying after his mother gave him a good spanking, or after he did not get what he childishly felt was his. At other times he must have been so excited and happy that his little body bounced involuntarily with the pure energy of childhood. Humiliation and ecstasy of babies and children.—But there is no history there; at least he had never been able to make order out of his childhood days, although many things did happen to him and around him.
But why am I afraid of the dark? His feet are pressing hard against the railing of the porch, the blackness of night enclosing him and the cottage on this northern lake.—He should have gone with Harry and Sheila. He would have sat beside Sheila in the front seat of the car (she in the middle, with Harry driving), her warm thigh warming his as the Studebaker bumped over the endlessly bumpy back roads, roads which circled the lake and wandered off in all directions into shrub lands and dusty farm country. Half asleep, he would have closed his eyes and listened to the rhythms of Sheila's endless talk.
—But he is waiting for Jessie. Why hasn't she come yet? When they last talked, did he make some foolish remark that only she noticed? He thinks about Jessie for a long time, and then thinks about his mother.
Thunderstorms terrified his mother, especially the ones that passed directly over their house and shook the whole neighbourhood with their explosions. When these storms came rolling out of the south (one end of the street darkened before the other), she would grab his hand and take him three houses down the street (towards the incoming storm) to his grandmother's house. The three of them (Mark, his mother, and his grandmother) would go down the basement to the recreation room, the budgie cage in his grandmother's hand. (The little bird was also afraid of thunder and would cower at the bottom of the cage near its feeder.)
The sky was always dark when his mother rushed him down the street, the houses covered in hot, humid darkness, and huge drops of rain just beginning to explode on the hot sidewalks. The water marks from the raindrops seemed to steam away almost immediately in these first few moments. Only later, when they were safe at his grandmother's would the pavement darken with rain and the gutters and eaves troughs begin to run with water.
The basement was the safest place during electrical discharges, his grandmother would tell his mother. And there they would sit, his granny sewing, his mother gossiping, and little Mark poking this finger in the budgie cage, frightening the poor bird until it fainted, its little feet in the air as it lay on its back.
As he sits on the porch, he tries to remember the sensation of his mother's plump hand in a warm, nervous grip on his own hand. Dark, damp curtains (always closed) hung from the two small windows of his grandmother's low-ceiling basement. Even as a child he noticed how low the ceiling was. His grandmother was almost sixty at the time. Although she died a few years later, he had a vivid memory of her pale face and grey hair. She wore heavy, uncomfortable clothes in that humid basement. But he could only remember the perspiration on his mother's face; she would use one of his father's large handkerchiefs to wipe it from her brow.
As the two of them sat on the small couch, with his grandmother sewing socks and his mother nervously talking, Mark made long sweeping crayon lines on construction paper; he liked to graph the length of the thunder and its various rumbles with these lines. His grandfather brought home piles of paper from his job as a cutter at a nearby pulp and paper mill (from where the smell of sulphur would on occasion drift through the neighbourhood, deliciously burning the nostrils.)
He does not remember any of the conversation, except his mother's complaining about the hot clothes his grandmother wore in such weather. His mother was in shorts and sandals and would be his own age then; she had a young woman's body and a pretty face as the photos in the family albums proved. He imagines that Jessie is his mother. (—A strange feeling accompanies this thought. He chooses not to explore it.)
For all the terror his grandmother and mother suffered, he enjoyed such occasions. He was allowed in these unusual circumstances to gorge himself on his grandmother's fudge, jelly beans, and chocolate marshmallow rolls, especially as the stormed raged and they paid less attention to his gluttony.
When they left the basement to return home, the air was cooler, but his blood, with all that sugar, would be rapidly pulsing through his little body. His face would be flush.
Thunderstorms never terrified him, rather they did the opposite: they became a source of violent excitement. Boom! and the whole neighbourhood would explode.
Something stirs in the bushes beyond the porch, and he puts his feet on the porch floor, knowing the noise is only a raccoon, porcupine, or some harmless troll looking for gold. He feels suddenly threatened. His body, despite himself, seems to be readying itself for flight. His mother's fear of storms has somehow been transferred to a different object: the dark, with its hidden power to unleash unknown violence equal to any electrical storm.
Out of the dark come the beasts of night, frenzied, roaring beasts, who would inflict any torture imaginable, unleash all mayhem in their power. At such moments he is fearful for his sanity.
But I've always been able to control myself, he tells his moon shadow on the porch. He reassures himself that his behaviour has never been remotely odd. (Except for those occasions in adolescence when he would happily run down the street during thunderstorms and delight in getting thoroughly soaked.) He has always been a nice young man, polite, cheerful—maybe a little reserved.
It has been years since he has gone alone into the dark of night by himself, the dark of a vast wilderness. The city has been his hiding place, where there are many dark sides, but none that frighten him the way the overwhelming darkness of this northern country does.
When Harry and Sheila left earlier that evening, he did not think about the coming night or the neurosis that it would rekindle.
I should have gone with them, he mutters to himself.
Something else rustles in the bushes, and then moves away from the cottage. For five long minutes, he strains to hear it return, but only the bullfrogs call to him.
Going into the cottage, he turns on the light and makes some coffee into which he pours some of Harry's Scotch. He picks up a book on the Celts, which Sheila has been reading. ("Without clothes, painted blue, their bodies burning with frenzy, they enter battle with their signature weapon, the terror they inspired in their enemies!")
But bugs begin to circle the lamp and he has to put the book down and turn out the lights. He takes the coffee out to the porch and sits down in the lawn chair. The whiskey warms him inside; he feels better now.
He remembers the night he stayed at his uncle's house—he must have been eight years old, if that. A sixteen year old girl was babysitting him and his cousin; they had given her a rough time that night with their childish antics. They were exhausted when they went to bed. It must have been New Year's Eve. The party would have been at his parents' place, which was why he was at his cousin's, a big house where he was taken after a great deal of protest. He did not like staying there over night.
In the middle of the night, he had a nightmare (from too much junk food before bedtime), a nightmare about being sucked into the slimy earth after wandering in a spidery swamp. He remembered thinking in the dream that this isn't real, it's just a comic book.
He lay awake in his bed for a long time and listened to the woodwork creak. It had not creaked like that earlier. There was a winter storm outside when he parted the window curtains. The air was full of onrushing black snow. He distinctly remembered seeing black snow.
It's only the house creaking, he told himself. But, all the same, he feared that something was trying to find its way into the bedroom; someone was below the window rattling the sash. The hall light, which had been on when he went to sleep, was now out, and his little cousin was not in the bunk bed above him.
He threw off the covers and walked down the hallway to the living room. The couch was folded out into a bed with the babysitter in it, a pillow over her head to block out the noisy creaking of the house. She was sleeping. He could tell by her breathing. With her was his six year old cousin, his face buried in another pillow and his body in a fetal position.
He stood by the foot of the bed for a long time, not knowing what to do. The girl turned over in her sleep. The street lamp shone into the living room onto her long, white arms, a ribbon on her wrist, her face twisted but shining in the light, her mouth open for her to breathe since she had a cold and could not breathe through her nose.
He listened to the creaking woodwork. He too wanted to curl up beside the babysitter as he would have done beside his mother at home. But he was not at home, and he knew that if he tried to do so now the babysitter would only have sent both him and his cousin back to their cold bunk beds. He was caught between the fear of the dark and the fear of being denied comfort and warmth. His head buzzed. He was sleepy, yet could not sleep.
Here the memory ends. He does not remember what happened next. Most likely the babysitter did wake up and send them packing. He is having difficulty focusing his thoughts on that piece of ancient history, a story that he has told himself numerous times until it has become almost a legend, and embellished like a legend.
He goes back into the cottage for the bottle of Dewar's, with the decision to tell himself more stories with a little help from the whiskey. But the bottle is empty, and there are no other bottles of liquor in the cottage. Sheila must have had a couple of shots before visiting her relatives. There is one beer in the fridge, and he takes that out to the porch to sip as he watches for movement in the shadows at the edge of the bush. Sheila has some marijuana that she sometimes shares with him in the evenings—but over Harry's silent disapproval. They are not behaving like responsible adults. After all, they are teachers in daily contact with impressionable children. If they were arrested and fined for possession of illegal drugs, they would ruin their careers, and deserve much more since they would be setting a very irresponsible example for their students....
Harry does not say this to them because Sheila easily ignores him, or worse (given the effect of the drug) breaks out in hysterical laughter. Sheila laughs a great deal when she is high; Mark then starts giggling. It's indecent the way they enjoy themselves over Harry's silent disapproval. The night before is a good example of their behaviour under the influence of the hemp god. Even though they were sitting on the open porch, Harry told them that he was going for a walk and some fresh air. Sheila suppressed her laughter, and then squeezed her left breast at her husband as he walked away, a gesture of mockery, which Harry did not see; it was more a display for Mark.
He does not like the taste of the beer. (It's an ale not a lager.) Depression, sobriety, and overly active senses are his companions for the evening. His tongue probes his molars for cavities.
He closes his eyes, and feels himself become anxious. People are sitting on the roof of the cottage; one of them is about to bend over the eaves of the porch roof and tell him something in a gravelly voice. Mark opens his eyes and takes a deep breath, and gets up out of his lawn chair. A few steps from the house he looks up at the roof, expecting to see nothing—and he sees nothing.
He realizes that he has been attaching erotic feelings to his memories, feelings he did not have at the time.—But he is unable to capture the texture of his life ten or fifteen years ago. The bare, white arms of the babysitter are one such creation.
He takes Jessie's hand and holds it, then bends over and kisses her on the lips. She slips her tongue into his mouth and between his teeth and presses hard, withdraws to look into his eyes; with animal hunger they kiss again. She stands up and takes off her bikini top. She kisses him again and undoes his jeans and slips them off...
He then replays the same scene in his mind with Sheila instead of Jessie. It doesn't quite work because he feels guilty about betraying Harry. Even if it is just a fantasy.
Harry and Sheila. A couple. She is forever giving Harry a hard time because she has more playful energy than he has. He puts too much of his own energy in tidying up. They become verbally aggressive in front of Mark sometimes.
"She wants you," said Harry one time as a joke. Sheila had been poking Mark and then trying to find where he was ticklish. She was always manhandling him.
"Of course not," said Sheila. "Why would I go to all the trouble of getting him dates and introducing him to new girls?"
"Whatever turns you on."
"You're sick. Besides, Mark likes me roughing him up, don't you Mark?"
"It wakes me up," he said, embarrassed by this conversation.
Mark could sense a growing tension between the three of them, but did not want to define it. Maybe that is how it should be among friends. Don't act out your secret desires and jealousies, just make light of them, keep yourself in reserve. But sometimes he wonders what would happen if he told Sheila, when they were alone together, his real thoughts about her, the ones he keeps to himself on nights like this one.
He moves away from the side of the cottage and looks up at the stars, bright sources of light shining on this dark world and the many other dark worlds of this galaxy. Their light gives him a little courage and he does not retreat to the porch. He walks across the clearing in front of the cottage to the path that leads to the woods.
He stares into the woods; the frogs and insects ring in his ears. From the darkness his eyes strain to make sense out of the two dimensional forms of black and dark grey.
As a teenager, about age sixteen, he once walked into the fields beyond his neighbourhood. Where the suburbs ended and the farm country began. It was very late at night. He could feel waves of fear washing over him, then subsiding enough for him to go a little bit farther into the night. He was challenging his fear, entering into the object of his fear, and he could feel his body readying itself for flight. The sensation was mostly in his chest.
Maybe it was a perverse thing to do, yet he wanted to see what would happen to him. What did happen was that as he went farther into the dark fields his fear subsided, and to his surprise he enjoyed the night air, the night noises, and the solitude.
Then what was he afraid of? The fear, however, did not completely go away—it is still with him—but he was able to objectify it, put it at a distance so its terror did not overwhelm him. He remembers thinking to himself that maybe he could do the same with other things he feared. But to his later experience each new fear was unique.
Twenty yards from the cottage he greets his fear as if it were an old friend. He can feel himself trembling slightly. He is in the woods before he is able to stop himself, and is following the familiar path that runs parallel to the shore of the lake, although not in sight of it.
Where the path makes a turn to the beach he keeps walking straight, a sleep walker.
"From the straight path, one day, midway through my life, I went astray and found myself alone in a dark wood," begins Dante.
He stops to assess his feelings. A shiver runs down his back at the thought of what he has done. He wants to run. Instead he lets himself run in his imagination. He crashes through the trees and brush; the shadowy, grasping hands of demons and the undead reach out from their dimensionless worlds.
After a few minutes his racing blood slows and he is able to reclaim some calm. The earth is bouncy where he stands, the ground mostly dead leaves and wet moss.
He walks farther into the woods and keeps walking for about ten minutes, not caring where he is going, ducking tree branches and moss covered bushes, until a noise from a tree sounds with a chilly blast. The weirdest sound. He could almost believe that Satan himself had come to claim him.—It is only an owl somewhere in the dark branches above him.
He sits down on a log beside the owl's tree, his back against a large rock. The owl is close, yet so high in the branches that Mark is no threat to it.
"Hoo, hoo-a-hoo, hoo, hoo," it sings. Deep and booming.
He has only heard their eerie call from a distance before. Now he waits, listening intently in the twenty seconds or so between each call, a deeply prevailing silence (no insects, no frogs), only a silence disturbed by the owl itself, startling him again. Then he hears its great wings beat as it takes flight.
After the bird has gone, he listens to the sounds coming alive once more around him, and he feels as if he too were some wild creature whose ears are sensitive to the smallest noise, the tiniest neighbour. Then he walks back to the path that leads down to the beach.
Across the lake the lights of the cottages have disappeared. The stars are also disappearing one at a time as a fog bank rolls up the lake from the south. He watches it come towards him and then engulf him as he sits on a rock on the beach.
He starts following the beach back to the cottage. Somewhere out on the water is a consistent splashing, a human-made sound. Someone swimming across the lake? No, it is the sound of oars on squeaking pivots. Someone is on the lake in the fog. He can hear the boat approaching the shore.
"Hey!" he cries out.
"Hello!" says a girl's voice.
Jessie's voice.
"Jessie?"
"Mark!"
She cannot see him yet, although she can hear him in the water; she realizes that he is wading out towards her voice. She hears a splash and then the rhythmic splashes of a swimmer. He is swimming towards her voice; she calls out to guide him. They laugh nervously, each to their own tension.
After he reaches the boat and tosses in his shoes and shirt, Jessie gives him a hand. The large boat sits high in the water.
"That was a silly thing to do," she says with another laugh. "Now we have no one to guide us to the beach."
He tells her he had not thought of that.
"It's over there," he says.
He reaches out to her wet hair and touches it. She feels the chill in her wet clothes. She too has had her own adventure that night.
"I would have arrived earlier," she says, "but I fell out of the boat. A bit embarrassing for such a seasoned rower."
"How could you fall out of such a big row boat?"
"I was trying to fish something out of the water."
"What was it?"
"It looked like a ribbon. But I didn't find it after I fell in, and then I couldn't get back into the boat because I hit my hand falling out. My hand hurt too much to get a good grip. After about fifteen minutes hanging on the side I found the strength to pull myself in."
He comes closer to her and puts his arm around her shoulder. The intimacy of the darkness and fog and boat encourages her to snuggle close.
She hands him a half empty bottle.
"Have some wine," she says. "It was full when I left." And she laughs.
"How's the hand now?"
"Much better."
He raises the wine to his lips, tells her it is sweet ("Too, sweet?" she thinks), and then takes the oars. She has turned around and sits in the back of the boat facing him. He starts rowing, and rows towards what she hopes will be the cottage. She has lost track of any direction during their brief conversation.
"I hope you can get a fire going in the cottage so we can get warm and dry."
"Of course," he says. "Don't worry, we'll be there in no time at all."
Mark pulls hard on the oars as the boat moves deep into the foggy night. The full moon reveals itself above them, although they are still surrounded by the fog on the lake's surface. He is rowing towards the moon; he must be looking at her face lit by white light. She confidently fills in the expression on his shaded face.
TIDE OUT
1974
The few cars on Main Street that Sunday morning were in a hurry to get through the city centre and had little intention of stopping where only a few lone people lingered. Those on foot had an uninspired light in their eyes as they passed closed shops and empty parking lots and ignored Don't Walk signals at intersections.
The sky, a dark mass of clouds, hung over the building tops; rain was almost certain to fall later that morning. The grey of sky, concrete pavements, and office buildings overwhelmed everything: the colours in awnings, billboards, unlit neon, and display windows were washed out. The city was a drab black and white photograph.
Life itself was about to be smothered in a colourless and formless existence. And I could feel myself turning to grey—face greying, clothes greying, heart washed out.
I stopped at the edge of a building and looked into a paved public square where a concrete fountain stood waterless, surrounded by hard, concrete benches. The square was between two tall buildings, and at the back of the square was another building of irregular shape, a theatre, library, or civic centre.
My eyes searched the perimeter of this place of concrete, looking for a spot to take shelter if the rain did start to fall. In one corner, a slab of concrete protruded from the building. If I had to, I told myself, I could sit on the window shelf below it and keep dry.
Not far up the street I met a student of architecture adjusting the pack on his bicycle. He too had spent the night at the rundown youth hostel. ("This is not a hostel," said a lunatic in the bed below mine, "This is a hostile.") Now he was deciding whether to stay another day or take a chance with the weather and head out to the highway.
My own pack was locked in the hostel; I planned to stay another night. For me there would be no hitchhiking to aimless destinations that day.
"Have you seen a tourist information booth around here?" asked the architecture student.
"No," I said.
We walked along the sidewalk for about a block until the entrance to one large building attracted my friend's attention. Inside the building were a number of shops. On one side of the main entrance was a tourist information centre. When I looked in the window facing the street, the place appeared to be empty.
But it was open. The door to the centre was inside the main entrance; the rest of the building was empty and closed. The lights were out in a flower shop; a drug store had a padlock on its door; and a vacant store had a sign across its window, "This Space For Rent".
In the information centre, a girl in a long green dress asked if she could help us.
"Yes," said the architecture student. "Do you have a map of the city. I'd like to know the best way to leave."
"I have one here. Which way are you going?"
They stood over a map on a table, with him asking questions and her answering. It was like a love song. Meanwhile, I was examining the novelties for sale: baskets, rugs, post cards, and books. It was a wealth of objects. When my friend had finished examining the map, he too began to browse. I picked up some leather craft made by local Indians.
"I didn't know there were Indians around here," I said to the girl.
"Oh, yes, there's a reservation twenty miles north of the city."
I saw a tourist pamphlet for the city on the table. The girl smiling from the photo on its cover looked very much like the girl in the shop.
"Is that you?" I asked.
"No."
"It looks like you," I said.
Then I noticed a young man staring out from a movie poster on the wall, a big smile on his face.
"Who's that?" I asked, pointing to the person on the poster.
"That's a pop singer whose movie is now showing in town. Just down the street from here. It's in French, mostly singing."
"A musical," said the architecture student.
"Have you seen the movie?" I asked the girl.
"No, but I hear it's very good."
"C'est bien," said the architecture student.
"Are there any afternoon showings?" I asked, with the hope that I might be saved from at least two hours of rain that afternoon. But I would have to sneak in to see it, since I had no money.
"I don't think so," the girl replied. I loved the way she talked. It was fun asking questions and having them answered.
Neither the architecture student nor I bought anything in the shop. Out on the street, we continued our slow walk.
"Beautiful girl," said the student.
"Yes," I replied.
The sky had become darker than before, the clouds lower in the sky; I thought that drops of rain were falling on my hair and shirt, yet I saw none hit the pavement. My imagination at work.
We were reaching the end of the commercial part of the street. About a quarter of a mile in front of us, a bridge went over something. Railway tracks, grown thick with weeds, lay along the roadside.
Although there were no huge, grey buildings here, I had just to look back from where we came to see them towering over the city.
"Your friends ran out of energy down here," I said to the architecture student.
"Pardon me?"
On this length of the street, I saw a submarine sandwich shop, a grocery store, and a shoe repair shop, but mostly there were very old houses, many of them in need of paint. A motel and garage station were not far up the street.
"So what do you plan to do now?" I asked.
"I'm not sure. I'll stay another hour or so to see if it rains."
The architecture student had his eyes to the sky and his palm out to catch any rain drops that might fall at that moment.
Just up the street we found a small park. We walked into it, about two acres of grass, trees, pathways, and park benches. A large sign at the entrance to the park displayed the face of a clock with moveable hands; the minute hand pointed to the seven and the hour hand pointed to the four. The sign informed us that the tide would rise to the height of twelve feet in the channel at four thirty-five p.m. At the back of the park there was a large, ancient bandstand of stone foundation and wooden structure. Beyond it was a concrete promenade along a stone wall.
Everything was grey, including trees and grass.
Two young men were sitting on the back of a park bench with their feet on the seat. One of them greeted us.
"Hello. How are things going?"
"Not bad, if the weather holds out," said the student.
"Biking far?"
My friend gave him the name of a seaport down the coast. When the fellow who asked the question heard this, he grinned, showing us a mouth of broken teeth, a black hole below his whiskers.
We exchanged a few more words. Then he asked:
"Have you ever seen the tide come in?"
"No," replied the architecture student.
"Oh! It's fantastic. The water comes rushing through the channel and fills it up in a few minutes. I've seen the sight many times since I got here last week. The water rushes across the muddy channel, filling it up in no time.—Say, would you like a smoke, and then we'll go over and take a look at the channel."
Since he was offering I had no objections.
"If you need anything, I can take care of you," he said as he held the smoke in his lungs.
After we finished sharing the thinly rolled joint, the three of us walked over to the bandstand and promenade. The other fellow, an Indian, had by this time left us. He had said nothing; in fact, he more or less vanished into thin air. I don't remember him leaving the park. A customer? He must have had business elsewhere. He may not have been there in the first place. My imagination was overactive sometimes.
"Here it is!" said our guide. "The water comes from that direction and rushes under the bridge over there, and then comes through the channel here."
He used his finger to point it out to us.
I looked at the architecture student; I could see that he was building grey towers on the other side of the channel.
"What do you think?" I asked him.
He shrugged his shoulders.
This local tourist attraction was nothing but a very large, muddy ditch. Sure, it was wide, and it would take a great deal of water to fill it, but as I looked down into the empty channel I said to myself, "So what?"
"...and the water comes rushing from that direction, and the whole channel in a matter of minutes is filled with salt water. I even went down to the water the other day to taste it; there's a path leading down over there, and it's also the best place to watch the channel fill up. Up here the place is usually crowded with people, especially at this time of year; so it's best if you come early to get a good spot to see the tide come in. You must see it if you get a chance. But it doesn't come till late in the afternoon..."
I had difficulty imagining a large crowd of tourists gathering for this event. But then, what do I know?
The three of us sat down on three separate benches and stared out into the ditch. Our guide was on the middle bench; we listened to him talk.
"The water rushes through the channel at high tide and fills it up to that mark over there. See, they have a specially marked pole out there so we'll know how high the water has risen. Apparently, a lot of money was spent deepening the channel to make it more impressive. It rushes under the bridge and through this channel first, and then it fills up the flat lands."
The three of us leaned over the wall to see a wide area of mud and muddy ponds. The fellow's voice lulled me as he talked on and on for what seemed to be ages. I was beginning to believe him, and made a mental note to return that afternoon to watch it.
"Do many come see it?" I asked.
"Thousands. They come from all parts of the country to see the tide rise."
"Which direction did you say it comes from?"
"The water will be first seen coming from over there, from underneath the bridge. First a little water will rush in—you mustn't expect a twelve-foot wall of solid wave to come crashing through. But you'll be amazed at how fast the channel will fill up. Do you see the direction in which that stream of water is now flowing? Well, the whole thing will be reversed, the fresh water will become salt water, and the inrushing water will fill the whole channel!"
We stared in silence at the muddy floor of the big ditch for about five minutes. Over the ditch, the clouds were still a drab-grey mass. But, then, for a minute or two, a small hole in the clouds allowed a shaft of sun to rush across the flat land beyond the ditch. For only a few seconds, the sun fell on us. Then the clouds quickly patched their hole before more sunlight could escape to earth.
"I must be going now," said our guide. "Maybe I'll see you later. Let's hope it clears up. Clear weather is the best to watch the tide come in."
We said good-bye to him, and he waved and walked off across the park and disappeared from sight. I looked vacantly down into the ditch. A mosquito landed on my arm to draw blood.
"Strange guy," said the architecture student.
"Yes," I said, and I watched the little body fill up with blood before it took flight.
"Mosquitoes in the middle of town!"
"Maybe we should have asked him to tell us about the local mosquito problem," I said.
The magic was wearing off.
Sitting on the park bench was a way to pass the time. I became vaguely interested in four or five seagulls at the bottom of the channel; they were fighting over fish in the mud, and squawking at each other like politicians.
The architecture student decided to leave also.
"Maybe it will clear up," he said, hopefully, as he adjusted the pack on his bicycle.
We said good-bye, and the architecture student got on his bike; with a little effort he pedaled down one of the paths in the park. He turned right when he reached the street and rode away, his back to the city centre and the monuments of his future profession.
I stayed to watch the seagulls. For how long I could not tell. One seagull would stand by his muddy piece of fish, guarding it against other seagulls. Another one would come trotting up to the piece of fish, and with much squawking would attempt to steal it. Once the seagull had driven off the attacker, he would try to drag the heavy fish along the mud towards a pool of water. At various times other seagulls would swoop down to land and follow the seagull with the fish, and would make all kinds of noises, hoping the seagull would drop his food. Eventually one seagull flew down and stole the fish, scattering all the birds. That seagull then began to drag the fish across the mud of the channel in the opposite direction.