White Noise Machine

Battling nature, and self, from dusk to darkness.

It’s twilight. I am half standing, half sitting on a rock that’s part of a spine of submerged rocks which cuts diagonally across the current of a remote river. I am alone. It’s only thirty feet to the shore, but it might as well be a mile. 

Time to go. Put up or shut up. 

I’m not stranded. But the bad knee is aching and I haven’t eaten since eleven and my muscles are protesting in twitchy pulses that make me feel weak. Beat up. 

The river roils darkly.

I lower myself into the water. A stale waft of air pushes up my chest from my waders as they compress beneath the weight of the river. The smell is a time capsule of the day. Sweat, smokes, wet wool. Why can’t they make waders that keep you dry? These things cost almost a thousand dollars.

Focus, dude. No mistakes here. 

In the daylight, I was able to work along the top of this little archipelago of submerged stones without too much trouble. But now, it’s too dark to see where they stop and where the deep recesses between them begin, and there’s no way I am going to risk missing a step. 

What’s the plan? The plan?

The plan is to work along the downstream side of the spine so that it breaks the current. That seems safer. It’s deeper on this side. Shit. How deep is it? My mind spins up a slideshow of the many ways this could go pear shaped. In an instant I could be swimming. You’re such a goddamn coward. I poke the water with my wading staff, prospecting for patches of gravel.

I stick my foot into the sluice of current that’s being squeezed through the rocks by the mass of hundreds of cubic feet of water upstream. Imagine. Hundreds of cubic feet per second. And then hundreds more. And more. The slideshow again. Dammit. 

Move, dude. Don’t get stuck here. You got out here. You’ll get back. Sometimes I get philosophical in these situations. Like: If a man falls in a river in the middle of the woods, and no one is there to see it, does he even get wet?

Where’s your phone? 

I know where it is, but I can’t resist the impulse to check the front pocket of my waders to make sure it's still there. I hold it up to my face, staring at the backlit photo of my wife that is my lockscreen. It unlocks. Technology is a miracle. No messages, no missed calls. Oh, that makes sense: No service.

I lock it and toss it back in. I guess it won’t matter. I laugh. I don’t know if it’s audible or just in my head. This happens a lot when I’m on the water alone. It's entirely possible that I’m talking to myself all day. There’s no way to know. Out here, nature is so big there’s no room to think about existing. No one to hear you shout. 

It’s time.

I make the first of several calculated moves. It works. I find a nice sandy spot behind the next rock. The current coils around my shins. Even with these oversized boots on I can feel the sand being eaten away by the water until there’s just a little pad of pebbles the size of a Post-It note under the balls of my feet. Balls of my feet, I say aloud. 

At least I think I do. I can’t hear it over the constant white-noise-on-the-TV sssshhhh of the river. Kids these days will never know that feeling. Waking up in the middle of the night realizing you fell asleep with the TV on. The programming ended hours ago and now there’s nothing coming through but the snow of random dot pixels firing endlessly. Sssshhhh. Hundreds of cubic feet per second. And again. Again. 

Move two is not as smooth. I step through the plume of current onto a stone the size of a grapefruit. It’s round and loose and it rotates. I feel the rubber sole slip, but just before I’m off, one of the metal studs in my boot catches a niche and I ride the rock as it rolls. I flail. My arm goes in up to the shoulder. Fingernails scrape. I bash my knuckles. I swear. Out loud, I think. 

The bad knee wobbles. I wiggle my toes trying to bring some feeling back into them. Seriously, why can’t they make a decent pair of waders? You’re telling me that Elon Musk can unload a Tommy gun into the door of a Tesla without making a hole we can’t waterproof a pair of overalls? These things cost almost a thousand dollars. That’s like, two weeks’ worth of groceries.

Damned inflation. 

I imagine my wife at home. Maybe she’s FaceTiming with her mother while cooking dinner. She’s making that rice dish. I’m hungry. She’s probably worried. She’ll have called. Or at least texted. How’s it going? She’s not fooling anyone. That’s code and we both know it. ‘How’s it going?’ means ‘Where the hell are you?’ Or sometimes ‘I worked hard on this dinner and I am hungry and I don’t want to eat alone’ but mostly, and generally, ‘are you done fishing yet?’ 

She’d be so mad if she saw me now. Waist deep, in a river, by myself, in the dark. Shit, it got dark. No, wait, the sun’s down but it’s not dark. Plenty of light left. Just use the trick that Drill Sergeant Robertson taught you: see with your feet. That’s right, my feet have balls and eyes. 

For moves three and four I go into Moose Mode. It’s a thing I do. It’s a little powerup, like Mario’s magic mushroom, but I double in strength, not size. Just push. Damn the torpedoes. I’ve got thousand-dollar waders with matching boots filled with metal spikes and two good legs — well one, at least — and this river ain’t shit. 

I transform. I am a fury of physics, unassailable. Incalculable. To my surprise, I stick the landing. 9.8 say the judges. Coach is smiling. Everyone is clapping. For my next trick! I say to myself. 

It doesn’t matter if it was out loud or not. No service, no one to hear me. Nothing but the sssshhhh of nature’s white noise machine, hundreds cubic feet per second. A never-ending snow storm of pixels firing. Megavision. I wonder how many cubic feet are in a television. Not the modern ones, but the one I grew up with that weighed more than I did. (Zenith, I think.) Eight cubic feet maybe? Nine? 

Ten feet to go.

You know what’s funny? That far seam wasn’t even fishy. But from here I can see why it lured me. It’s got the look. (You know the one.) The way the foam line from that pyramid-shaped rock upstream curls into that little elbow just below where that feeder stream drops in. Juicy. Prime lie. Gotta be someone sitting right there. Probably a big rainbow. King-of-the-pool rainbow. Head shaker, drag taker, day maker rainbow.

But no. No one home. Big waste of time. Shit, I’m hungry. 

I stab at the water with my wading staff, dipsticking the eddy behind the next rock. Nothing. Really? I stab some more. Ssshhhh. There. What’s that? Log maybe. I can feel the slideshow booting up, this time with a tide of anger that runs up my neck and into my cheeks. You’re ten feet from shore. You could jump this. It’s dark, dude. Just go.

So I do.

But it’s not a jump, really. It’s a leap. For a moment there’s a feeling of buoyancy, low gravity, like when you hit a bump in the road real fast and your body lifts out of the seat. I’m flying-floating, feet-per-second. Something catches underfoot and I am flying again. Five, four, three, two, one, sssshhhh!

---

When I was a kid — maybe four? — I jumped into the deep end of the pool. We had gotten permission from the man who’s property my dad managed. I think it was summer. Doesn’t matter.

Apparently, I walked right over to the deep end, waved at my mom and smiled, and jumped in. No floaties, no tube. Noodles weren’t even invented back then, but if they had been, I wouldn’t have used one. Nope, I just waved goodbye and leapt in. 

Of course I don’t remember that part. But I do remember hitting the water. And I remember that fizz of bubbles the chlorinated water made and how, as I sank to the bottom of the pool, they sped upwards as if they were finally on their way home. I remember thinking that I must have set them free. Sssshhhh. King of the pool. Prime lie. 

I fish my phone from the waterlogged front pocket of my waders and hold it up to my face. The backlit photo of my wife looks back at me. No missed calls, no new messages. No hows it goings. I toss the phone into the car and strip down to my underwear. I throw everything in the trunk and turn the heat on full blast. I dictate a text as I rumble down the dirt road headed toward civilization. Headed home. See you soon. Technology is a miracle.

I pull into the garage and open the trunk. It’s a crime scene photo. I stow my rod, dump out the thousand-dollar waders and hang them on a nail to dry.

I can smell the rice dish, and I’m hungrier than I have ever been.