Cold Wet Socks

A story told from the perspective of a boy destroying a beaver dam.

At dinner they couldn’t even look at each other, and pretty soon Dad would be taking me to McDonald’s and Burger King after he picked me up from school to get dinner. We’d get home and my mother would start feverishly vacuuming like she had started to do whenever Dad came home. Once he looked at me almost as if to ask ‘help me understand what had gone so wrong?’ but he would see my indifference to the question that I wasn’t old enough to understand yet and that stony resolve would return.    

    I always felt bad about holding my ear to the door of the office to try to hear their arguments. And I always felt bad when I came down in the mornings and woke my Dad up on the couch while I was getting milk for my cereal before I had to get to the bus stop. It only had taken a few months. As hard as I squeezed my eyelids and knuckles together I couldn’t see how it was going to get better.

    “Well we’ll go down to the bank tomorrow then together!” I heard my Dad’s shout through the door, then they both got really quiet. That feeling again, my ear to the door and that too familiar cringe of regret and shame shooting through my rectum and intestines.

   

I was jogging across the backyard, crunching some leaves, squishing the moisture out of others. I had forgotten to grab tissues and I wiped away my tears with the back of my hand and then grabbed my nose like a full sponge and squeezed and pulled down, the snot gone from my nose but now pooled in my palm. (For some reason whenever I did this, my thoughts always turned to playing baseball...) It was mid October. My house vanished behind the thickets of amber and crayon orange cytoskeletal veil overhead, although the veil was now dying and losing its anchor to the branch. I wiped the snot onto a tree as I passed, then stuck my hands into my jacket. Stupidly, I found napkins in there and used them to clean the rest of my face properly and I felt proud to be alive for a few seconds and floated among the trees and boulders in absolute freedom. I could smell the lake and I was starting to see the reedy banks and the oily emulsion like surface of the pond through patches in the deciduous latticework hanging above.

    Pretty soon I was teetering along the edge of the pond, playing the game of letting my feet come dangerously close to slipping into the water before regaining my balance at the last moment. I usually did this every day, but ever since school had started I had forgotten to come down to the pond. I was never around water enough, to witness water that needed no permission to gather in huge ponds, lakes or oceans. I could watch waves for hours.

My thoughts turned back to my parents. If they said they loved each other and their love was like their love for me, then why wasn’t that enough? The pond was calm in its answer. The pond was about three fields wide. I saw that no one was fishing today as the brush erupted all around me and got too heavy and I slipped, soaking my right knee on the cold wet leaves as I had to try to climb over the thick brambles. The pond seemed darker and colder than I had remembered it from the summer, as if it was bruised and weary of the coming winter with a sideways glance.

    Then I was at the exit of the pond; the stream at the west end that rushed away, down the slow slope of the hill. It started skinny, like I remembered it, but I noticed it had become quite large the further I went down, and there were even some static areas of stream without much in the way of a flowing current, pushing out onto the flat parts around its banks, dead leaf soup. Up ahead, I spotted what was definitely the newest thing discovered thus far, just peaking up over the flat mirror edge of the water where the stream was supposed to continue, resembling the ill begotten crown at the top of a pile of a demolished building, like the kind in pictures the news showed whenever they were reporting on an earthquake or a bomb going off somewhere. I wondered if my parents had noticed I was gone.

 

I jumped down into the strange riverbed gulley and slowly gazed at the stick and mud monstrosity, stacked to the height of my chin and stretching as wide as my Dad’s van. It looked like tree vomit. I felt like I was invading the space at the foot of the dam, feet carrying me closer to examine it. Slick smooth rocks clicking and the delicate cake batter sand hissing with my each step. The dam glared back at me.

    Upon closer inspection I could see the gnaw marks on some of the branches realized then that a beaver had done this, not the forest, and I immediately felt I had an argument against the structure’s right to exist at all.

    I started with rocks, and found ones in the riverbed and the banks of the stream and pulled them out of the ground that had been sucking on them like hard candy. I tossed them down at the branches making the row of the crown’s spikes, but they deflected the blows with ease. I caught my breath then searched and found a huge branch, and stood at the top of the dam and beat down at the crest of the mud and sticks; some started to break off and the mud packed in between beginning to move and I started spearing it under the water, into the places I had exposed, and I could feel fever like warm milk seeping and settling behind my ears. Before long the water was beginning to find places to flow over. I felt as though my breath was new breath, like an elixir of cold flame that I could taste and it caused me to work with even greater fervor, beating and bashing, reaching under the icy water so I could tear at the structural supports. The sun was beginning to duck below the tree line. I lost track of time. I sucked blood from the frozen gashes along my knuckles.

    The next thing I remember is I found myself standing where I had started, at the base of the now battered dam. There were several places where there were now large voids in the wall and the water poured through them, rushing past my ankles, stinging, icy cold. I could see even the most basic level of the designer’s structural plan for the dam was only being held together by a single remaining but unseen thread of luminous ingenuity: an intelligence of another species of animal that I was quite mystified was even possible.

I could see the final bulge in the wall of the dam. That was the final place. The uneasy feeling of water soaked socks under my feet, cold and wet. I placed my hand on the place I had decided would be the final piece to destroy and I could feel the weight of the water restrained inches away. A pool of water that must have been almost as tall as me, stretching at least thirty yards back. Math was a weak subject for me, but I still understood the tantalizing amount of potential energy and power being contained before me. Just tear it away now, I thought, don’t be afraid anymore…

 

I heard the echo of a barking dog, then climbed out of the riverbed and searched until I found a rock almost too large for me to lift. After I waddled it back to the dam, swinging it between my knees, I stood, took aim and flung it with a push and a leap, watching it THUD resolutely into the spot I had correctly suspected to be the piece holding back the surge, and with a gaping yawn and salvo of snapping branches the dam gave way and the water fell and exhaled down... the stream surging once again.

I sat and watched the water pour. I heard the pond say thank you, like a titan thanking the solitary, brave man who had just dug a splinter out of the boulder size callous of its giant sole. And I laughed, the beaver! It would come back… or maybe it was already watching. I hoped that it was and tried to imagine...  

But when I did it wasn’t smiling…

In my vision it did gaze at me from somewhere in the growing dark, but I was reading something other than what I had expected. It made me go stiff with shock, because in its eyes I could see it wondering how close I had come to tearing that last piece of dam while standing in the path where the stream would surge. It knew I was not a water breather.

I sat now with growing dread, looking, looking at where I had stood where the water now flowed. I did not know where that heated, thousand-edged amulet of determination that had replaced my heart had come from, but the same way it had caused me to destroy the dam, it had also nearly led me to remain where I would have thrown open the gates unto myself. The water flowed now and that made me feel good, but I could see its power, what it could have done to my small bones and lungs. My chest felt like a terrible dark cave that my voice was trapped somewhere in the depths of, far enough to trap my screams. I was not out of control of things like I had always assumed. I could decide as much as I wanted for myself. Even extinguishing my own flame...

My hands were shaking, cold and wet and there was more shame now, a different kind of shame, bewilderment and how could I ever ask my Mom to take it away? What was responsibility? The forest surrounded me, alone. And it couldn’t help explain. It just had life, it knew that’s all it had to know, it couldn’t explain what thoughts were…