Attribution: Photo by Jonas Jaeken on Unsplash
By Geoff Carter
When I was about twelve years old, I used to walk home from school past a savings and loan that had a deposit envelope dispensary mounted outside its front door. It was supposed to be used for after-hours deposits. All you had to do was pull out the envelope, put your material in, and place it in the metal deposit slot.
I had my own routine. Every day on my home, I would stop at the box and pull out three or four of the manila envelopes and put them in my pocket. A little further ahead, I would cross the bridge over the Menomonee River. It was tall, about sixty feet up. I knew that river well. My brothers and I would go there in the summer to pIay in the glide just beyond the falls, catching minnows and crayfish and exploring the limestone cliffs looming over its banks.
The river ran wide and shallow under the bridge on my route home. I would stand there, watch the river flow, and then drop the envelopes one by one into the swirling waters and watch them as they slowly floated out of sight. I’m still not sure why I did this.
In my memory, those afternoons walking home from school were always gray and overcast, but that can’t always have been the case. There must have been some sunny days walking home, but maybe my memory of gray skies is colored by a feeling of melancholy as I watched float out of sight, a feeling I—once again—couldn’t explain to myself at the time.
My father had recently passed away. Perhaps the floating envelopes were emblematic of my dawning realization about transience, loss, and fate. Maybe they were sort of a vague prepubescent longing for new experience, to travel, like my soggy envelopes, to the sea. Maybe it was just something to do.
I was an avid reader as a youngster. I’d read Scholastic books like The Wonderful Journey to the Mushroom Planet, The Sparrow’s Fall, War of the Worlds, Tarzan, and many others. I’d read The Jungle Book and other works by Kipling describing the strange and exotic world of India.
I had a vague idea of the wide, wide world but no experience of it outside the suburban town where I lived. Travel then was not as common as it is now—at least for me. We’d visited Arkansas and northern Wisconsin but had gone no further. Visiting exotic places was only a dream. One of my favorite TV shows then was Flipper, an adventure series about a boy and his pet dolphin set in Key West, Florida. I was fascinated and intrigued by the boy’s adventurous life on the seashore and his close connection to his friend the dolphin. I would have loved to have gone there, but it seemed like an impossible, as if it were on another planet—like Mars.
Another one of my early reads was an abridged version of Huckleberry Finn, the American classic about the wild boy who teamed up with Jim, the runaway slave, to escape the shackles of civilization. Thoughts of Huck and Jim must have been swirling around somewhere inside my head, too, as I dropped my little rafts into the river. A man escaping the injustice of slavery and a boy escaping his abusive father on a vast, slow-moving, and wise old river simultaneously pulling them into and through the absurdities and vagaries of “civilized” society resonated with me.
For them, the river became the path to freedom, the means of escaping injustice, but the course of their escape was in many ways beyond their control. The river took them where only where it wanted to. They were passengers not pilots. So, in my childish musings, I might have figured the river could represent some form of fate. After all, we had studied Greek mythology in 7th grade English. I had a good idea how fickle the gods could be.
As I stood on the bridge watching the manila envelopes float away, I could imagine myself standing on one of them, steering my way through slow-moving glides, black fathomless pools, white-water rapids and dangerous eddies (like Odysseus’s Charybdis), but like Jim and Huck—and Odysseus—my voyage would ultimately be beyond my control—in the hands of the flowing waters.
In his poem, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers”, Langston Hughes compares the flow of river to the passage of time, of history. He mentions the Euphrates, the Congo, the Nile, and the Mississippi as silent witnesses to human history and as molders of the collective human soul. As Hughes writes in the poem, “My Soul Has Grown Deep Like Rivers”. The river carves the earth as time carves our lives.
Now, as an adult, I can look back at those manila envelopes floating down the river and think of them as specific moments in time, moments that passed silently through—all too quickly—never to be seen again. Now, today, these moments in time are washed up somewhere or dissolved in the constantly flowing waters. Some may be at the bottom of the sea or perhaps washed up on distant shores. It doesn’t really matter. They are gone.
The first envelope might have been a middle-school crush—as fresh in my mind today as if I saw her yesterday. That next one may have been the first classroom I taught in, the room with the windows overlooking the skate park. And that one might have been the first time I held my daughter as the dawn broke through the hospital room window, just hours after her birth. That one might have been standing before my father’s casket. These moments have passed. They do not exist anywhere anymore, except in my memory.
The events themselves have passed as quickly and as completely as my floating envelopes, but their marks on my being are indelible. Moments in our lives pass but are ingrained in our memory. These traces make up who we are. The emotional flotsam and jetsam that has washed up on the shores of psyches define us.
Our course on the river is unpredictable. We try to steer our way past the rapids, the eddies, to avoid the sandbars and wrecks, to pilot safely through the storms, but our control is limited. The course may take us to beautiful exotic places, to fantastic adventures, or to appalling carnage and unthinkable cruelty. All we can really do is hang on and try to enjoy the ride.
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