Perched above the Potomac, in a tree-encircled spread, lies a deer hollow that dimples in like an old stone step.  Fallen leaves are caught here in the groundswell – autumn leaves even in June.  Morning fog swirls up from the river, and there by the edge, curling light-footed and patient, is something of a trail.  In places, hilltop winds have blown the chalky dirt clear.  Summer nights, herds of deer that rest here intertwine themselves into a single-bodied deer shape. As many as forty deer will fill this bowl and before light, they will scatter beyond these woods to neighborhoods.  Just past the trail and over the edge, the embankment tumbles, crashing steeply over jagged boulders.  The river lies there at the gorge bottom, a slithering silver mirror.  

Fog lifts, fading out above the treeline.  More woods stretch out behind the deer hollow.  Little trails grow large, eating up the woods until that sudden swath of asphalt.

A boat tracks across the river, and for a moment the surface looks like tangled mesh.  The river settles over itself again, glassing over and mirroring up.  A parking lot fills car by car at the edge of the woods.  Deer tracks scatter and fade.

•    •    •

When I lift my paddle from the water, the boat slows on a gentle arc and moves against the bank.  A figure appears above me, disrupting the Virginia ridgeline like a finger across a projector lens.  Through the fog his features and movements are lost in the peculiarity of fog-distance.  “Hey up on the ridge,” I shout and the sound shakes me with its power, amplified as though I’m shouting in a helmet.  The silhouette-man starts, and he seeks me out through the cold, fish-breath of the fog.  But he cannot see me.  He searches, inclining almost over the edge, until his hands move to his face, and I hear a confused sound.  It’s a sound unsure of its target, like the sound of a child trying, for the first time, to whisper into someone’s ear.  His voice fluctuates and all the words are lost.  So here we are, this silhouette-man and I, shouting words at each other through the fog, which softens and blends them like oatmeal and rebounds them at their source.  

So I retreat and breathe myself back into the fog above the water and listen to his calls. Above me on the ridge, the silhouette-man looks up suddenly and forgets about the bubbled sounds below him.  And then I hear it too, the wide and heavy wash of some commercial jet liner in that other fog that swirls beyond the ridge-light.  It occurs to me that the silhouette-man can see the jet from up on the ridge, as I can see him from this boat on the Potomac.  And the bubble-mouthed fish can see me through the swirling silt – can hear the rocks crack like popcorn as they roll along the riverbed.  But the jet-people cannot see the silhouette-man who cannot see me, and I cannot see the fish whose breath-bubbles pop like muffled corks.

The world has spread itself in layers here: water to fog and dusk-lit silhouettes and beyond from clouds to clear.  We catch the whispers but miss the ridgeline shouts.  This world that always seems so close has stretched out strangely here and only the softness of loud sounds – the loudness of small sounds – clues us into the artifice of the design.  We are all divided here but really not so far apart.

•    •    •

Above the Aqueduct Dam, the river slides smoothly, dragging through the blackness.  Pre-dawn winds cling cold like riverbed silt.  The moon is gone.  Water cascades over the edge of the dam and plunges down into the darkness.  I slip my boat behind the curtain of the waterfall and find myself in a long and narrow passageway.   I turn in towards the wet and mossy wall of stones and keep the icy water at my back.  Feeling my way along inside this tunnel of strange walls, I find fingerholds ahead – block by block.  Through the curtain, I see a glow begin to spread across rockshapes and daring trees.  I turn to face out from this secluded shrine as the sun hurls the first morning rays onto the Potomac River; and when the light strikes the dam, rainbows ride the falls like so many schools of minnows.

Below, Great Falls echoes full-bellied and deep and carries on down through Mather Gorge.  Great Blue herons stand gray against gray cliff walls, and the river hooks to find Difficult Run Creek coursing in.  The river splits again and again, making islands on higher water days.  There’s a bridge and a dam.  And a channel that goes the wrong way most days.  And a bridge and another and more.  And miles of sparkling glass, then wind-chop and a city all spread out.

•    •    •

These are places that I know.  There are others all along the way.  I find them day by day, and they feed into my mind’s eye like points of color through a kaleidoscope lens.  Dawn and dusk lie upon each other there like moss and water – fog and light.  The scene rolls up then, and I have it.