The Rope Swing, the Swastika, the Oldest Whale I Know
Scott Black
There was something very erotic about watching my best friend’s wife piss into the river. A former life-guard with long lithe legs, tall cheekbones, and short blond hair, Penelope sat waist-deep in a shallow pool scooped out of limestone by thousands of years of erosion. A green one-piece bathing suit clung to her contours. Concentrating, she closed her eyes, exhaled, looked up at me, smiled. I threw a twig into the water in the middle of where I judged her pee to be, watched as it was borne toward the edge of the waterfall, toward her husband and others frolicking in the pool below, toward the rope swing we had come for. I didn’t know what to make of it.
I still don’t, and wonder why it sticks with me, this peculiar moment. What exactly was I thinking? I’d like to know. It’s different now—immediacy gone forever, replaced by imagination, by highly suspect fragments of image and threads of narrative, by a powerful but elusive emotional impression. And so I grasp at it, clumsily scattering the pieces, gathering them, fitting them together as best I can to see what takes shape.
My best friend, Sam, his wife, Penelope and Keith—that was our merry band, all of us in our middle twenties. On the way to the rope swing, Keith and I had smoked a joint in the back of Sam’s box-shaped topless CJ-7 Jeep. The Jeep’s knobby tires hummed deeply against the highway, the moist hot summer wind blasted into our faces and past our ears, the THC seeped into our brains.
I have no idea where we went, other than somewhere in northeastern Alabama, where history is everywhere on display. The brick-red clay underfoot, which turns rivers maroonish brown, is indicative of an abundance of iron oxide in the soil and below it, too, deep in the earth, which made Birmingham a center of mining and steel production, the so-called “Pittsburgh of the South.” The hills and valleys, knobs and ridges—evidence of the same seismic event which bore the ancient Appalachians—eventually flatten out south of Birmingham and ease into a flood plain with a richer, loamier soil.
This land of humid heat and hills and rusted dirt is heavily forested—70 percent of the state is covered by a combination of oak, hickory and pine. Ninety-five percent of this land is privately owned, mostly by timber companies, industrial farms, real estate barons.
But we had not left behind the city of Huntsville and the marked roads to enter some secret haven of the gilded southern aristocracy. It was no surprise, then, that at the end of a nameless dirt road we found old American pickups parked and locked beneath a store-bought “No Trespassing” sign nailed to a pine. A trail curved into the trees.
There is an element of chance to encountering people back in the woods, far from police and hospitals. I had seen, out in the country, pointless fist-fights and pocket knives drawn over too long a look or one too many beers. I had also seen, though, simple reflexive courtesy and kindness from people who live in small towns you’ve never heard of, towns with names like Paint Rock, Sweet Water, Cuba, Coffee Springs, Wedowee, Boligee, Brilliant, Dodge City, Allgood.
Penelope, who grew up in Elkmont, Alabama, which holds somewhere between 400 and 500 people, knew all this. She had not seen high-school pep rallies erupt into gang fights which spilled out of the gymnasium and into the hallways, the lunchroom, shoes squeaking, tongues cursing, blood spattering, chairs flying. But she had seen other things. In these situations, she was both more comfortable than us city boys and more wary.
On that day, though, there would be no real trouble. In that boundless pagan cathedral filled with butterflies and horseflies, rattlesnakes and hummingbirds, greens and browns and yellows in the woods and wispy whites far up above against the fierce cobalt sky, trouble seemed very far away.
We clambered out of the tall Jeep, grabbed towels and cigarettes and plastic bottles of soda, and filed into the forest down the path which looked to double as a streambed during heavy rains. Keith lit another joint and inhaled and passed it to me and I sucked in the pungent smoke and let it linger in my lungs. Sam and Penelope, who had 9-5 jobs with drug tests, did not partake, just sauntered tolerantly along ahead of us.
We heard the place before we saw it. The first noises were faint, indistinct, and though they sounded human we could not be sure they were not the cries of birds. As we continued on, however, they became human and happy, took on gender, and we realized that all along they had been followed by a deeper sound, the sound of a large thing—like a body—splashing into water. Closer still, we heard the even lower sound of water falling from a height onto water.
Emerging from the forest into the natural clearing carved by moving liquid, we saw a muddy river, a 10-foot waterfall, and, let’s say, eight people in and around the water. Rivers: future canyons, and history in the strata of even the smallest. There, on the bank, on the upriver side of trees and tangled in roots and brush high above the water line, were collections of leaves and twigs showing where the water once had been. Farther down: striated layers of mud and clay met the water, red and brown and black streaks that might one day be a piece of sandstone in the sock drawer of some earnest youth.
Beneath the sand and beneath the water was limestone, gray and chalky, porous and soft. Unlike igneous rock, which is formed when magma cools rapidly, or metamorphic rock, which is literally transformed by the tremendous pressures within the earth, sedimentary rock is formed by the accretion of sediment. The stone beneath was once organic material composing vast numbers of aquatic invertebrates, which floated through the briny deep millions of years before we had come sauntering down to find a rope swing Sam’s cousin had told him about.
Limestone held the forest, girded the river. The place below the falls must have been especially soft to be worn away so dramatically, to leave behind such a deep, wide pool. As the water tumbled over the lip of the falls, this, too, was being slowly worn away; the lip was gradually retreating, elongating the pool below.
Limestone is composed, occasionally, too, of vertebrates. It holds fossils well. The state fossil of Alabama—who knew there were such things?—is Basilosaurus cetoides. Basilosaurus, meaning “regal lizard,” suggests a dinosaur, but cetoides comes from Cetacea, the order of dolphins, porpoises and whales. Initially misidentified, the creature was actually a mammal, one of the earliest known whales: a hairy, air-breathing, young-nursing slinky creature 80 feet long with a serpentine body and a mouth like a crocodile. Of course, we can only speculate about its behavior—whether, like the dolphin, it engaged in recreational sex—and what it actually looked like. Doubtless the drawings we see, based on what we know of its skeletal system and the anatomies of other whales, are pretty accurate, but in the end they still represent the vision of the artist.
Five teenagers were down below the waterfall—two young women sitting on the bank in shorts and bikini tops, one shirtless young man sitting beside them and smoking a cigarette, one shirtless young man standing next to the tree the rope swing was tied to and one shirtless muscular tattooed young man flying through the air on the rope.
Because limestone is porous, streams like this one can wear holes and caves through it like bacteria through Swiss cheese. Spelunking is big in northern Alabama. You can slip into interconnected networks of caves looking for adventure, see tiny bats, step in huge mounds of their guano, shine light on albino catfish which can’t see it, wriggle through foot-high spaces behind your best friend’s mom, whose muddy butt blocks the light from her headlamp but shines darkly in yours. You can get lost if you’re not careful. Before you, thousands of years before, people lived in these places. One particular place, Russel Cave, near Bridgeport, Alabama, has been occupied for thousands of years by different tribes of peoples. Following a joint study of the cave by the Smithsonian Institute and the National Geographic Society in the 60s, the NGS purchased the cave and donated it to the nation. It is now a U.S. National Monument. What began long before nations and states will continue long after. Do you remember water on Mars?
We walked upstream, where a sunburnt middle-aged couple was splashing with a little blond girl in the shallows at the beveled edges of the river, and found a place to put our things. We said hello, took off our shirts and shoes, piled them on a rock next to our towels and walked in the tepid river up to the edge of the waterfall. We looked down to where the water was crashing into the pool, bubbling and roiling. It looked higher from up there, and we weren’t sure what sharp branches poked up from below the water’s surface, so we watched awhile as the guys went off the swing, forming mental maps of the safe zone in the center of the pool.
Excavation is risky—one can mistake mammal for reptile, fit together bones from entirely different creatures (intentionally or not) and produce the remains of something that never existed. This happened in the 1840s, when a leviathan was assembled from the bones of various animals, including Basilosaurus. The man who concocted it toured the United States and Europe, charging admission to his exhibit of “sea serpent” skeletons.
The group below watched us watch them. “Jump in,” they called at last, knowing we wanted to. And so we did. Keith went first, yelling as he fell and curling into a cannonball; then Sam, silently wind-milling his arms until the moment he splashed down; then I jumped forward and grabbed a breath before kerplunking into the water and hearing the bizarre splooshing sounds beneath it. When I came up, I swam toward the swing, following Keith and Sam. Climbing out, I noticed that the bottom was rocky, but felt no dangerous tree branches. Penelope was walking down on the trail beside the waterfall. She didn’t mind water, but was afraid of heights.
We talked awhile to the people. Or Keith and Sam and Penelope did. I was—and am—shy, timid, awkward and aloof around strangers. I climbed the makeshift ladder on the side of the tree—slats of wood nailed into its trunk—caught the rope Sam swung in my direction, took a deep breath, tightened my grip just above the knot on the coarse thick yellow rope, pushed off the tree and arced down and then up, aiming for safety. Adrenaline and THC boiled through my synapses. At the apex of my swing, I kicked my legs up and let go of the rope, spinning up into the air, weightless, exalting in the vertigo, turning a backflip and landing with a splash in the center of the pool. Kerplunk. Sploosh. They were all smiling when I surfaced, and I tried not to. “Nice,” said the guy with the tats, and I nodded. I waited my turn, did it again, then followed Penelope back up the trail for a cigarette.
My relationship with Sam’s wife had followed a strange trajectory. At first, I was fiercely against her. This was in large part due to my being jealous at her cutting into our friendship, making him want to get a steady job in our hometown and opt out of the grand adventure we had planned in Alaska. There was also her country ways of thinking, which seemed to me silly and superstitious. And then there was her temper—for all her sweetness, she could turn fierce and furious. She’s “high strung,” he admitted first, and then later “she’s a wildcat.” So there was that. Later, though, we grew closer and talked and developed that strange bond women and men who would not normally associate can grow into when thrust by circumstance into platonic interaction. She thought me handsome and sweet, told me I would someday make some woman very happy. And was there not a certain spark at times when we laughed?
One time, we dared each other to eat a piece of dried dog food—a man and a married woman, both, presumably, adults, sitting in her front yard while her husband turned wrenches beneath his Jeep—and I had gone first, then made a face when she popped hers in her mouth and started crunching. She had giggled and slapped my shoulder and crunched down again and he had slid out from under the vehicle and said, “What are you guys doing?” The look we exchanged had been just slightly guilty. Not guilty in the way we would have been if planning a tryst or even sneaking a peck under mistletoe, but just mildly guilty as though we had inadvertently crossed some spider-web-thin line by having too much fun there without him, by forgetting, for that instant, that he was there.
We walked back up to our things and lit cigarettes. Penelope sat down in a shallow pool near the river bank, and I sprawled beside her on a rock. We both just sat there silently for a moment, lolling, hearing the water, smelling the clay, feeling the cool wind and hot sun on our wet skin, blowing beautiful streams of cancer into the air and seeing them fade to nothing, watching water spiders supported by surface tension skate nimbly around and across the river’s skin.
Aldous Huxley, in The Doors of Perception, wrote about taking mescaline. The title comes from a William Blake quote: “If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite.” In this writing, Huxley—working with ideas from “the eminent Cambridge philosopher, Dr. C.D. Broad”—proposes that the human brain is essentially a “reducing valve,” the function of which is to winnow down and order vast quantities of information, to make manageable the infinite.
Every second, nerve endings all over our bodies—in our eyes, ears, mouths, noses, insides and on every piece of our skin—are recording and streaming innumerable hordes of data. And this is with our relatively limited senses. What if we could smell like dogs, see like spiders, echo-locate like bats, read pheromones in the wind from miles away? We apprehend the world though a pinhole, and still this produces far too much information to make any sort of intellectual sense out of.
Down below, the guys continued to climb the tree and swing on the rope and drop down into the warm reddish-brown water. The girls in bikini tops still sat watching, and I wondered if Penelope was watching Sam to see if he was looking at them. I had. When we were down there, I had glimpsed the dark outline of an areola, looked quickly away, then back again. Next I observed the guy with the muscles, the sinewy flesh moving all together effortlessly, wondered what Penelope thought about that. He was sexy, hard and glistening with water, lateral muscles taut as he hung on the rope and swung through the air.
Some say our bodies are simply DNA receptacles—ornate, graced with whistles and bells, but gene cases still. Others, that we—the squat and lithe, young and old, taut and droopy—are mere watersacks. This is sure: Water cycles through the world, floating in the air; waxing and waning in the sea; streaming, coursing and running in rivulets across the land. It flows through plants and soil and rock, giving life and chipping slowly away at continents. It courses through our bodies, bearing plasma, working with salt to conduct electricity from neuron to neuron, toe to brain. It flushes our wastes, products of millions of biochemical reactions all working in concert to allow us to dance, perform surgery, hike and swim.
I noticed something disturbing. The muscular guy, the friendly one who had commended my backflip, had a swastika tattooed to his shoulder. I have a friend who grew up in Cullman, Alabama, where people used to spray-paint a message on the Welcome to Cullman sign: “Niggers—don’t let the sun set on your backs.” These people are terrible, my friend says. They hate everyone—gay people, black people, people of different religions, people who come from other places. Yankees who talk funny. But he is these people, too, in some inescapable way. He loves his father, the Republican Southern Baptist, the mechanic, the man who couldn’t bring himself to shoot his sick old favorite dog and cried when his son did.
The guy with the swastika—I was sad for him, for his ignorant, tiny world, his pinhole half obscured. I think now of Howard Zinn revealing how the poor and dispossessed—slaves, Native Americans, indentured servants—often banded together in the early days of American Colonialism, regardless of body type or melanin level or name for the Un-nameable, of how the feudal lords had used the myth of “race” to divide and oppress.
I was also furious in a cold, bitter, pitiless way. I had grown up on Army bases, become friends with people of all genetic combinations. Most of them were being threatened and assaulted by this beautiful rune from pagan antiquity which originally symbolized the four powers of nature.
There are always people, aren’t there, who know better and stand up and say so? Buddha. Jesus. Mark Twain. Gandhi. Not me. I didn’t renounce him or try to drown him or talk to him about Reconstruction and the Southern underclass. I sat there smoking my cigarette in the sun and imagined him breaking his back on a boulder hidden below the water’s surface.
Then I felt guilty, scared. What if it came true? Would Penelope and I, former lifeguards both, feel compelled to rush down and stabilize his spine, give him CPR? What would Jesus do, indeed. I looked over at Penelope to see if she had noticed any of this.
I have to pee, she told me.
Go ‘head, said I. What’s stopping you.
She laughed just a little.
I’m peeing, she said, and I felt neurons firing throughout my crotch, blood rushing, an involuntary spasm of my pubococcygeus muscle.
When we speak properly of the sublime, we refer not necessarily to beauty, but to an experience of vast power, to that which dwarfs us, perhaps that which will annihilate us. It can be mesmerizing, transcendental. English huddled beneath the Nazi blitzkrieg have reported such feelings. Is this why people run with the bulls? Imagine looking up from a frail lifeboat at a hundred-foot sea, a water wall carrying within it whole ecosystems, perhaps a Basilosaurus, just before it curled and came thundering down—with the terror, the numbness, the sur-reality, the acute knowledge of your own mortality, would there be a deep harmonious serenity? Would it be the best moment of your life?
She peed into the river, and I enjoyed watching. I threw a twig in the water to escort her urine, and we watched them advance toward the lip of the waterfall. Down below were all the people splashing around, treading water, sitting on the bank. I kept waiting for something dramatic to happen.
What if, at the moment the twig struck the water, just before it was driven underwater by the force of the water above it, the whole crik turned to pee, a dirty yellow river of piss that frothed and foamed as it tumbled into the swimming hole? What would the people do? How about blood? What then? What might happen?
Nothing happened.
It is too much to take, the river, the forest, the world, the planets, the shimmery stars in our ever-expanding cosmos hurtling at unfathomable speeds toward the outer edges of infinity. The world is enough. Too much. And yet, though it sounds selfish, I sometimes still want more.