IN THE WATER

If you’re lucky, as a child you might have got to spend time at the hiking camp that’s up on Saddleback Mountain in Maine. When you arrived, you spilled out of the car and breathed in the smell of the balsam fir, carried on the cold clean air, and you feel as if you are in a place where you could start again, become what you want to be but didn’t know until then.
A stream runs near the site, splashing and babbling over rocks as if it’s playing. You stand by its bank and close your eyes, and it almost sounds like it’s speaking to you. When you cup your hands and drink the ice cold water, it’s like being baptised into something. You plunge your hands back in, and throw the water over your face, shudder from the cold but feel as if you’ve just washed off the cares and worries of a lifetime.
Have I ever felt this happy, you think to yourself, and then no: not happy. Content. At peace. When the rain falls at night you’re safe in a tent, wrapped up and warm, but you also feel safe in the rain, it’s drum on the tent like a lullaby, white noise letting you drift off into sleep. In the morning you see rabbits and birds you can’t name, and when you walk, you feel as if there is air between you and the ground. You look up, and the winds catch the clouds and move them fast above you, and you feel as if maybe they are still, and you are the one who is moving, spinning.

At one point you wander off on your own, not very far, probably within shouting distance, and you know you ought not to but can’t resist. You follow the stream down a little way, jumping from one bank to the other, or dancing across stones to reach the other side. The stream turns, and you turn with it, and round the corner, hidden by the fir trees, is a small pool where the stream widens before narrowing round another bend. A woman is swimming there, or rather she is twisting and turning and splashing and diving, just like the water and the spray. You pause, feeling like you’ve interrupted, and decide to step away, but she turns like an otter and sees you there.
You want to stammer an apology but the words freeze in your mouth as she looks different, sparkling, as if she is made of a million points of light. Then she starts to fall apart, outwards in spray and splash, like a wave breaking, white water and jewelled drops and a mist of spray, and then it all falls back into the water with a sound like the rain made, and she is gone. There is nothing but the stream, and the pool, and the pines, and you.

There are gods in the mountains and gods in the trees and gods in the clouds. And you know that there are gods in the water, because that time, when you were young - you saw one.