The Memory of Water
Posted by Chris Clarke on October 18, 2008
This is my whole life: driving alone through the landscapes of the arid West. There is someone waiting for me at home, or there is no one waiting for me at home, or I am already home, watching the far horizon recede through the dust-spattered windshield. It doesn’t matter. My whole life. I have been single, and I have been in love, and I have been somewhere in between, mired in relationship, and driving alone in the land where rivers end their lives in sterile saline sumps.
I have made journeys in the company of others, and that company is fine as often as not. Conversation makes the miles pass more easily, stories to share and delicious arguments over trivia and then road’s end is reached and the prosaic story begins, travel forgotten. Driving alone my mind is untethered. Ideas float to the surface, pass, are forgotten. Resolutions made and dissipated. I have reached profound decisions, come to startling realizations, all of them left at roadside: a desert paved with stony, discarded thoughts. They run in drifts beneath the surface, an alluvium of discarded intellect.
The road slices through a ridge in an alluvial fan. The cut exposes drifts of cobbles, lens-shaped in cross-section, and bands of finer gravel and sand alternate between them. Each pocket of rounded rock commemorates a violent flood. Each layer of gravel a more temperate flow. The sand that covers them all blown in from the beds of lakes dead a million years, beaches that fringed seas with plesiosaurs in them.
I travel the desert landscape like water. I follow the path of least resistance. I meander, each obstacle deflecting me in turn. Mountains drift past incised with deep and narrow canyons. Water carved them in torrents, then dried up. Cones of rubble repose at the canyon’s mouths: water shaped them by flood, then rose as vapor. Salt dust covers the flats, rises in swirling dust devils a quarter-mile high. Water filled the valley floors, seeped in from the subsoil, evanesced to leave mats of haline crystals to crumble beneath my boot soles. The rock itself laid down on the beds of unnamed seas 12 thousand years ago, 12 million years ago, 120 million years ago. The lakebed dried beneath the feet of unimaginable thirsty animals. You can still trace the cracks with your finger.
I am likewise canyon-carved, brought forth into a wetter world and green, toes perpetually wet within their leather, welts of mosquitoes a constellation on my skin. Water was everywhere there. I breathed it in to flow from my brow. I watched the sky for gray encroaching. A lushness surrounded all, an excrescence of green, an immediacy of leaf in bud. The very rock was different, smooth gray shales still wet inside where I broke them, their smell that could slake my thirst. A slap of flat tail behind the reeds, all shimmering beyond. It was like that here once, it was like that in me once, my heart’s flow caught content in glowering schist chasms beneath the hemlock and hobblebrush, Queen Anne’s lace in the meadow. Every growing tip shrieked joyous here and now. Rain that forced us down off the mountain gave way to wet sunlight just as our hike ended.
All memory now, that water dried up in me; a promise turned astringent, sweet springs gone alkaline.
All memory, that water. The memory of water shapes this desert. There is remembered water all around me, sharp cutbanks and sinuous stripes of sand, lost lakebeds’ laminated layers. I could drink it all and still fall parched and gasping to the rock.
