Fruits of Insanity

to reach and touch the sky

One of my earliest memories is looking up at the sky through clear water, my body as light as air as I gaze up into the bright blue sky just out of reach, and I lift my hand to it with my mouth closed and my eyes open but the water shines in prisms around me that I try to touch, my hand a shadow against the sky. And then, a bigger hand, reaching down through the water to clasp mine and I'm heavy and wet and the sky is further away.

Trying to articulate it feels strange, because that memory is from when I was three years old, and the pictures in my head have no real words attached. I don't think I was even scared, seeing the sky through the water in bright shining beams. Family lore tells the story that my three year old self didn't know.

We were at Lake Meade on a houseboat for a family reunion with all of my father's parent's family. Lake Meade is man made, created when a dam backed water into the mountains, so the edges of the lake are steep. It doesn't take many steps for a small child to stumble past where they can keep their head above water, and suddenly, only three steps in, they are in so deep and the bank is so steep that it's impossible to get out of the situation on their own.

The way Dad tells it, someone was counting children (there were only about fifteen of us at the time, Joy and I were our parent's only babies although Rachel was on her way) and asked him, “Where's Rhyssa.” He looked couldn't see me, and his next impulse was to look down at the water, and there I was, in too deep, my eyes wide open and staring. He reached in and pulled me out.

None of us drowned on that trip, although that was a near tragedy.

My grandpa knew a lot about being extra careful around water. His family grew up in southern Utah, in a little town that few people know. His parents homesteaded a farm at the top of a hill where the spring was that carried the water that irrigated the entire town. That meant that across the front of their little blue house ran an irrigation ditch.

Right now, I live in Tennessee, where water comes in ridiculous quantities. Today, as we were heading to Alabama to see Rachel and her family, weather started as we left town, and continued most of the trip. It was scary to be traveling along the highway and realizing that our windshield wipers were a bit tattered so that they left an arc of streak behind them. But the scariest thing was passing a creek where the storm drains were clogged or overwhelmed so that the water on the road came up past the curb and across the road. The SUV in front of us had no trouble with wading through the creek that had taken over the road, but we were in a little car.

We did make it. It's the type of thing that gives me nightmares.

I mean, literal nightmares. I've dreamed of sitting in the back seat of a car in flash flood conditions, with my feet hanging out of the window, because it was a dream, and getting to a place where the car had to go through standing water and then suddenly the road dropped away like a mixture of driving through town and a white water rafting trip, and I screamed as I woke up because . . . yes.

Southern Utah is a desert, I've seen flash floods in a desert, but for the most part, water is portioned and regulated and in my grandfather's childhood, that irrigation ditch was a lifeline to the community. They kept the water flowing clear and free and every minute of every day it was allotted for use by some person in the community. People kept weeds out of the irrigation ditch so that the water could get where people needed it.

But an open ditch isn't safe, and Grandpa's younger brother found that out the hard way. He was nine years younger than Grandpa, only a year old when he fell into that ditch and drowned.

That episode, even though it happened ninety years ago, marked all our family. It's one reason that we are cautious around water.

All of Grandpa's children swim. His grandchildren—I was always okay in the water, tentative, not as agile as my father or some of my siblings. Mama never swam. She was nervous around the water, which may come because her father was a sailor.

Mama grew up in Ohio and Grampy was an engine man on one of the ore freighters on the great lakes. Mama would send her father off to his boat in the spring, and then they would spend the summer racing his boat into various harbors until school started, and then he'd come home in November or so. Grampy was on the lakes the day that the Edmund Fitzgerald went down with her crew.

It's difficult to be anything but careful around water when it's something that can be so capricious and hungry.

I don't think that Mama had any conscious wish to avoid the water because it took her father away, but I think that might have been part of the reason that she never liked it. When I think about the water with Mama, I picture her with her hands holding up a baby just barely able to walk and leaving the shore only deep enough to wet their toes with a sun hat with a giant floppy brim. She never got her face wet, never mind her hair.

Even though I came so close to drowning as a child, I never feel fear when I think back on the experience. Instead, I remember the look of the sky through the water, and the way the light lingered in odd places like gem stones hanging in the sky almost close enough to reach, and reaching up to take hold of them only to grasp my father's hand, pulling me out of the water and back into life.

Word count: 1046
Prompt 8: National Drowning Prevention Day (7/25)