The Stream

No motivation other than impulse. Alternate to the transactions of action the adults around him took. Tasks and time for what exactly? To purchase time for other tasks? Or no act at all? Who would he sell his days to when he grew up? What would he do? That didn’t matter, not here, not now.

As the cool water eddied around his mosquito bitten ankles and the late summer sun fanned out through gently roiling leaves above, no worries permeated his mind. Spears of golden light danced over his latest, doomed masterpiece like old Hollywood spotlights. Burning away all notion of tomorrow as the water carried off yesterday in cascading tiers of bent glass. This was a good one. Three levels. The perfect dam.

His father stopped atop the crude bridge and called down to him.

“Nice.”

The boy glanced up distractedly at the man standing atop the two mighty ash trucks spanning the ravine.

“Thanks.”

The man shambled off toward the house. The boards creaked as flakes of plaster tinkled down from the man’s filthy clothes. He looked back at the triple dam and resumed basking in its unparalleled perfection. Surely his greatest. A magnum opus of stone and muck.

...

He pushed back from the desk, his roller chair arcing away in disgust. The meager passage hung above the rest of the blank page like a guillotine. The little text bar on his computer flashed in and out of existence expectantly, as if demanding the next word. He strode to the kitchen and stood scowling before an open fridge. The plastic container chittered as he plucked a cluster of grapes from its mother vine. He stood chewing, blind to the still yawning door. The sickly yellow light glowed on his shirt. In his mind he saw only that dam.

A lost love. Whose exhilaration haunted the memory through insufficient comparison. His whole life, as an artist, or writer or any series of supplemental job titles required of that life, never brought him there. To that feeling. And more pathetically, he’d spent years trying to articulate that feeling. Dozens of attempts had been made to write about those days. Each a failure. All he knew was that he craved it. The dam builder never truly grew out of him.

It was easy to wax poetically about the virtues of creating something so impermanent. He could always conjure up a mawkish, purist celebration of artistry for no other reason than to create something beautiful. To create knowing that even his most robustly engineered dam could not withstand the test of time, much less the next heavy rain. He knew from the onset, before the first stone was placed, that the forces of nature would scatter his stones like dandelion seeds, the rush carving ever deeper into the gully with every thunderclap. But there was something more. Something that slipped past his grasp. Some greater explanation for why it enraptured him so.

Autism? ADHD? Another obsessive personality disorder he was born just too early to have diagnosed? Maybe. But these answers felt impotent, too general, yet also too definitive. The sensory element? The hyperfixation? Of course one could make the argument that this ten year compulsion was driven by those neuron scratching fixes. The feel of the water. The hush of it falling over the lumpy ridge. The satisfying clatter of weather worn stones locking together beneath the silky, whispering surface. But it was more. It was religious.

Or as close to it as he’d ever come. That feeling of interconnectivity with time and nature, the contentment in the face of insignificance and mortality. The worry free joy of doing. Scattered throughout that stream were strange, angular stones. Some of a composition alien to this part of the world, brought here not by the churning push of the glaciers that had made his valley but by human hands. They bore vague, eroded scars of the names of the people from above. Illegible graves from the old cemetery perched atop the lip of the gully. The entire back row, the oldest locals, all now sat embedded in gravel, wreathed in green beards of algae that danced downstream like fire. That was one vital component of all of this. Death.

But the stream was also a place of life. It was this glaring duality that further enriched the experience. Minnows, crawfish, turtles, frogs. Water striders, birds, bats and ducks bobbing down the stream like garish little boats. Fallen trees whose spongy trunks broke out in bright orange mushrooms. And of course, the occasional femur, coughed up by the roots of the mighty trees as they toppled into the water scything away at their slope. Strangely, the boy was never concerned with ghosts.

Now. He longed for that feeling once more. The domain of creativity had been sequestered into white walls. The products of this form of play herded into these little cages and given life support in definitions and justifications he heard himself repeat, but never fully trusted. Art on walls. For a purpose. Hanging from nails in electric light. But these drawings felt like distant echoes of that feeling. Faint renditions of a song recorded over and over, its essence shaven off one diminishing copy at a time. These works of art, they were him. But those dams were not just him, they were the whole world, all of life, all of time. Entangled and imbued. Experienced with every evolved sense. A ceremony of mind and body, every stone considered. Aching back and sore muscles.

What better way to spend a day?