To Fling Out Broad Its Name — Will Wellman
The day before yesterday under my northern window I saw two shy little blossoms on an almond tree—the first almond tree in blossom. On the mountain the cyclamen turn to leaves, in the sea, the dark blue fluttering of the kingfisher.
I give thanks.
George Seferis, A Poet’s Journal (December 2nd, 1946)
Each lifetime mimics the entirety of history—microcosm to macrocosm—and so one day can contain decades. A few months ago, I went on a kayak trip in north central Florida with my cousin Jim. The trip was almost exactly 24 hours long. We left on a Friday afternoon, paddled the entire Silver River and then 20 miles up the Ocklawaha River, spending Friday night in a swamp and ending our trip by Saturday afternoon. Though it was a single day, I’ve had stretches of months pass by faster.
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The Silver River may be one of the most gorgeous rivers in the United States. It is a short river, only 5 miles long, and fed by a series of springs that comprise one of the largest artesian spring systems in the world. Collectively these springs pump out more than 73 million cubic feet of water each day. The main spring, Mammoth Spring, is at the head of the river and from overhead looks like a gigantic geode—the turquoise of the water, the various green shades of plants, the cream white sandy riverbed. The clarity of Mammoth Spring continues down the entirety of the river, allowing one to easily see from the surface of the river to the bottom, which can be as far down as 30 feet in parts.
Silver Springs and the Silver River have an interesting history that encompasses both the untouched aura of the natural world and the hectic busyness of a tourist attraction. Since the late 19th century sightseers have flocked to the area. Those who came across the river back then must have felt as if they stumbled into a dream—after traveling through miles and miles of the redundant greens and browns of oak hammocks and pine flats they would have encountered a river so clear and blue they’d be forgiven for thinking they were on a Caribbean beach. Once found, it was never forgotten.
Eventually the Silver River runs out and dumps into the Ocklawaha. It happens so quickly you initially don’t realize you’re on the Ocklawaha—the Silver doesn’t terminate into the Ocklawaha as much as it becomes it. What helps delineate these two rivers is, well, the water. The Silver River’s clear spring-fed water hits the Ocklawaha’s black tannin-stained water and disappears immediately. At some point I looked down, saw opaque brownish-black water, and realized I was no longer on the Silver River.
The Ocklawaha River is a northern flowing river named after a corruption of the Creek word for muddy. The river’s eastern bank borders the westernmost parts of the Ocala National Forest and its western bank runs along an expansive wildlife management area. It is nearly all wilderness. The 74-mile-long Ocklawaha runs from Lake Griffin and dumps out into Florida’s longest river, the St. Johns River. The Silver River is a tributary of the Ocklawaha, which is a tributary of the St. Johns. If you wanted to, you could paddle all the way from Mammoth Spring outside Ocala, Florida, to the Atlantic Ocean outside of Jacksonville, Florida—90 miles as the crow flies.
Though the tourist attractions end with the Silver River, the Ocklawaha holds its own weight with an understated sense of beauty. It is not the immediate sugar high of the Silver River but a slower and more disciplined aesthetic. It begins with the dark brown and black hues of the water dyed by tannins released from decaying vegetation. And then as you look up from the water you encounter various shades of brown, green, and gray along the floodplain from trees like bald cypress, tupelo, and cabbage palm, along with the occasional pop of red, orange, or yellow from a red maple. Along the riverbank, dozens of sunning gators and turtles stretch out on fallen trees and branches. And on those fallen branches, too, are blue herons and great egrets and limpkins. Anhingas and wood ducks cruise along the waters as ibis and red-shouldered hawks cut the sky.
I don’t know if it was the lack of tourists or the subdued surroundings, but when we hit the Ocklawaha, time seemed to dilate, to spread out along the edges, to submerge into the river’s unseen depths. More or less, it came to a creeping halt. As we floated up through central Florida along the Ocklawaha’s surface, I imagined something about the river led it to be of an inordinate density. Perhaps there amid the tree-marked emptiness, the river’s anomalous mass placed such a stress upon reality that the curve of spacetime stretched and stretched until it slowed like the river and a parallel pace was achieved.
—
More than anything, Taylor wants a child. She has wanted one since she herself was a child. Though painting is how she spends her days and earns her living, it pales in comparison to her hopes of becoming a mother. It is the apex of all her desires. Currently we are childless. We have been trying to get pregnant for over half a year—the daily test strips and temperature checks to chart Taylor’s cycle, the barrage of sex around ovulation we half-jokingly call making deposits, and then the weeks of anticipatory waiting. When I left for the kayak trip, Taylor was in the midst of disappointment: her period had returned to signify an empty womb.
Growing up, I always thought having a child was just something I would do one day, like going to college or getting a job. But now—nearly 40 years old—I am beyond terrified of becoming a parent. Twelve years ago, I was diagnosed with a rare kidney disease and for the last 11 years I have been on dialysis. Three times a week I go to a clinic to receive a five-hour treatment on a machine that acts as an artificial kidney. Two needles, two lines, one filter—blood goes out, blood is cleaned, and blood returns. Though it’s kept me alive, eleven years of dialysis has also wrecked my body and mind. Most days the treatments leave me wiped out and I’m constantly dealing with a host of related medical issues. Adding anything else into the equation of my life horrifies me.
As all close relationships do around serious decisions, Taylor’s and my individual wants came to a point. Our point—the vertex of our desires—resulted not in a bend or a break but rather a realization that Taylor’s desires outweighed my fears. This was nothing magnanimous on my part; I simply saw something deep and genuine in Taylor I could not ignore and had no interest in stifling. So, roughly six months before I left for the paddling trip, we began trying.
When Jim and I arrived on the Ocklawaha, two or so hours after we began our trip, I was flooded with thoughts of Taylor. Though it’s completely normal for pregnancy to take months if not years, Taylor has experienced each empty month as a failure. I’ve tried my best to support her, but, in many ways, she is alone in that pain and I circle around its tangent. From my kayak, I looked out over the unending water, trees, and sky, and wished she could be there to see—to experience—it all. These trips force you into the present: all the regular obligations of life dissolve and your tasks are only paddling and paying attention. I wanted that simplicity so much for Taylor.
As I monotonously dug my paddle into the meandering black waters, I composed a mental letter to her. There was enough hope in the words that I felt, somehow, they could span the constraints of the space and time that separated us. I sent this out to her somewhere along the Ocklawaha, a few miles north of the Silver River: How many months will pass before your gift comes? I wonder with you from hundreds of miles and a world away. I wish I could bring you out of the future and place you here, in the present, where all things converge. The immediate and clear spills into the saturated and opaque—the deeper hues win out and the future escapes you.
—
It’s hard not to think of the linearity of one’s lifetime on a river—there are so many poems, good and bad, that have forced this metaphor upon us. If life is a set of tortuous turns flowing ever further through time, what do we make then of northern flowing rivers? They turn the metaphor on its head. It is as if the future is now—the present—and you’re making your way further and further into the past. Does one eventually arrive at some place where time doesn’t end but instead has not yet begun?
—
After an hour or so on the Ocklawaha I saw a small, bright bird making its way before us in short, sporadic flights. It would wait on the crown of a tree that had fallen into the water or on a branch that hung over the river. When Jim and I came within twenty or so yards of it, the bird would then take flight and disappear further up ahead. Eventually we would come back across the bird and it would wait, watching us, ready to begin its next leg as our navigator.
I knew the bird within minutes of seeing it, a belted kingfisher (Megaceryle alcyon). With their giant head, lazy slick-backed crest, small stocky body, and long bill, it’s near impossible not to identify them. Belted kingfishers are smaller than crows but larger than warblers. Their body is a blueish gray that could pass as slate, and they have a white chest along with a white collar that wraps around their entire neck. They get their “belted” name for the slate band that wraps around the top of their breast. Both male and females have this belt; however, females have an additional, lower-along-the-breast belt that is an orangish rust color. This is an example of what ornithologists call reverse sexual dimorphism—unlike most bird species, the female is showier than the male.
The kingfisher flew before us from the moment I first saw it. Each bend and turn would reveal another stretch of river and somewhere near that stretch’s end the kingfisher stood watch. I waited an hour or so before saying anything to Jim. I kept thinking the bird would fly off and no longer be up ahead. But it never did. I was convinced it was the same bird, Jim wasn’t. He told me there was no way the same bird would keep flying ahead of us that many miles. Jim assured me there were dozens of these birds inhabiting the forests and floodplain along the river.
I’ve since learned that male kingfishers—which our guide was—are very territorial. This fact is in Jim’s favor. While it could be that a single bird flew along the stretch of river we paddled, the reality is that, most likely, a bird wouldn’t leave its territory and we passed through multiple kingfishers’ domains. Regardless, something resonated within me beyond the logics of territory size and flight limits—I wanted the bird to be the same bird, to be more than just a happenstance repetition of species. Deep in my heart, I yearned for something beyond a sign or symbol, something that could lead me into the waters ahead where Taylor waited. A place where terror no longer held sway.
—
There are dozens of kingfisher poems. The bird has stuck out in the human imagination for centuries. Most of these works are nature poems describing the bird and its physical brilliance. Kingfishers are by no means drab. Dozens upon dozens of kingfishers are painted with startling and dazzling plumage. (Google the blue-eared kingfisher or three-toed kingfisher.) There is also an almost cartoonish aspect to the bird. The kingfisher’s too-big-for-its-body head and long beak make it stand out amid the avian abundance of this world.
Occasionally one of these kingfisher poems will reach beyond the physical into the metaphysical. And even more rarely, a kingfisher poem will transcend itself in domestic sublimation—particularly, Amy Clampitt’s poem “The Kingfisher” from the collection of the same name. The Kingfisher was Clampitt’s first full-length book of poetry and was published when she was 63. It quickly gained an audience of admiring critics and Clampitt became a nationally renowned poet. Praise was given, associations with titans like Dickinson and Whitman and Moore were thrown about.
A third-person short story in miniature, “The Kingfisher” esoterically unfolds the dissolution of a couple’s relationship. Supposedly, the break-up the poem records is Clampitt’s own. The 42-line, seven stanza poem is chock-full of birds and bird allusions—nightingales, peafowl, Firebird, kite, bellbird, quail, thrush. When the kingfisher finally shows up in the last stanza, “the color of felicity afire,” it comes as an arrow revealing a changed landscape of “uninhabitable sorrow.”
It’s a placement the kingfisher has not historically known—being the bearer of disappointment. The dozens upon dozens of kingfisher poems that precede Clampitt’s find nothing but joy, exuberance, and beauty with the bird. From the beginning of Clampitt’s “The Kingfisher,” one gets a foreboding sense that something is awry, and the mind begins to wonder, even hope, how the titular kingfisher will swoop in to save this couple’s deteriorating relationship. It never does, though. Instead, the kingfisher is turned into a metaphorical weapon that unleashes unbearable memories Clampitt had long left “untended.” This is the power and paradox of Clampitt’s poem: she undercuts universal notions of beauty as purely good through the kingfisher. And through that action, the kingfisher becomes more than just a pretty bird.
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Belted kingfishers nest in the earth of river banks. During the breeding season, two birds will engage as a pair. The male will then get to work testing potential sites out with his bill as the female watches on from nearby, chirping out in approval or disapproval of the sites. Once a suitable site is found, the pair shares in the work of excavation. This process of digging out a burrow—the bill as shovel, the feet as broom—can take anywhere from a couple days to a few weeks to accomplish. Once finished, the upward sloping tunnel can be as long as eight feet and will soon be home to 6-7 eggs. The teamwork that began with building the nest continues through incubation and the raising of the hatchlings.
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I was 26 when my kidneys failed. The disease I have, focal segmental glomerulosclerosis (FSGS), causes an autoimmune response wherein the body attacks the kidneys, permanently scarring the glomeruli—capillaries in the kidney where waste is filtered. Eventually enough glomeruli are scarred that the kidneys can no longer function enough to sustain life. Waste and toxins once excreted through urine build up within the blood to dangerously high levels. On average, FSGS results in kidney failure over five to ten years. My kidneys failed just 18 months after diagnosis. I went from celebrating my 25th birthday to being on the precipice of death in a year and a half.
Fortunately for me and millions of others suffering from kidney failure, there are the life-saving treatments of dialysis and transplants. When I first got on dialysis, I was obsessed with the reality that 50 years before—when neither of these treatments were widely available—I would have died at 26. Since then, I have been possessed by an existential urgency to fill to the brim whatever time I have remaining. Like a reverse Ocklawaha, the thread of my life seems so impermanent as to be weightless and the curve of spacetime straightens out and rushes on before me.
—
As I watched our kingfisher fly along the seam where woods meet water, I thought, too, of Gerard Manley Hopkins’ rollicking, stress heavy sonnet “As Kingfishers Catch Fire.” Hopkins’ well-known poem captures the iridescence of the kingfisher’s feathers alight before suddenly leaving them behind to move on to dragonflies and then the sounds of stones, strings, and bells. Like Clampitt’s kingfisher poem, Hopkin’s “As Kingfishers Catch Fire” is not really about kingfishers. Rather, the poem focuses on the unifying particularities of each created thing and their capacity to, “Selves—goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,/Crying Whát I dó is me: for that I came.”
This focus on the thingness of each thing, was an obsession of Hopkins. Influenced by the theologian/philosopher Duns Scotus, Hopkins developed the terms inscape and instress to capture his philosophy—his deeply intuited belief—about the uniqueness of each and every thing. Inscape, a hard term to fully define, is not just an object’s unique identity but the ability of each object to act out that unique identity. (It’s important to add that inscape is not only about living things but all things—a kingfisher as much as a tumbled stone.) Instress, on the other hand, is the capacity of one to recognize the inscape of other things. This capacity exceeds beyond the acknowledgement of another object’s uniqueness and is more akin to a near-mystical experience of the object’s inscape. For Hopkins, inscape and instress are not so much learned as lived out. These formative acts, in turn, bring a greater awareness of the spiritual uniqueness of all things, shifting one from a worldview of objects to one of myriad causes for praise.
As I see it, the kingfisher lives its days out in a constant act of inscape. It is always selving—each swoop, each dart, each purchase of each branch, each catch of each fish. Humans on the other hand seem to have a much harder time with continually expressing our uniqueness. There are a host of issues that put pause to our inscape. Seeing the kingfisher fly through the riparian wilderness of the Ocklawaha was an experience of both instress and jealousy—I yearned to have that simplicity of being. There was a part of me, a good part, that wanted to be a kingfisher. And yet, I know the complexities of human life are what bring depth and richness to our lives. Maybe the sway from low to high, from terror to thanks, is actually our inscape—not the emotions in and of themselves but the act of carrying forth through it all.
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A few years into our relationship, I discovered a form of communication I had not previously known. It happens in the moments when Taylor and I hug or lie down together in bed, those times when we bring our bodies close against the other’s and remain there for a while. A conversation beyond the reaches of language then occurs. Our flesh speaks to the other in a vocabulary our rational minds can only nod or guess at. Occasionally these subconscious undercurrents will stray and mark a ripple across the surface, echoes of this carnal dialogue. When we let go, be it a minute or hour later, the history of that conversation remains within us both—like a bodily memory, we carry a piece of each other back out into the world. Our I’s—our egos—become a little less clear, a little more tannin stained.
—
The land along the section of the Ocklawaha Jim and I paddled the first day was mostly swamp. Though our trip took place in the dry season, these swamps were by no means barren—there was plenty of muck, mush, and mire. As the sun descended closer toward the horizon, the only points of high ground we found were taken by other campers. Jim and I paddled further. Eventually, though, we decided to camp in the swamp and use the last bit of sunlight to set up. We had hammock tents and weren’t too worried.
Our campsite was just off the river. It was muddy and there were pools of standing water on the periphery. The ground was littered with the knees of cypress trees—knobby, wooden, finger-like projections that rise from the roots and stretch through the soil above the water line. Wolf spiders (Lycosidae spp.) paraded the mucky ground hunting insects. Every time I looked around their multiple eyes would reflect my headlamp’s light. Tiny swamp stars. It occurred to me multiple times that night Jim was probably the only asshole I knew crazy enough to camp in a place like this with me.
After stringing up our hammocks, we sat on a decaying log, heated up beans and rice, and made a small fire. Thankfully the weather was cold enough that the mosquitoes weren’t too bad. We sat around the fire for an hour or so and caught up. Afterwards, we packed up our trash, cleaned our pots, and made our way to bed. I had been wearing sandals and used my hands to scrape off as much dried mud as I could from my feet and legs before entering my sleeping bag for the night. As I lay suspended above the cypress knees and swamp, barred owls cackled and hooted in the distance. I was worn out and at peace. I let out a thanks for the day and all that had occurred.
—
Recently, I’ve been reading from the French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s book The Visible and The Invisible. At the end of the book is a standalone essay entitled “The Intertwining—The Chiasm.” Merleau-Ponty uses this essay to sketch out an ontology of flesh—a term Merleau-Ponty employs to describe that thing which links the subject and the object, the seer and the seen, the visible and the invisible. For Merleau-Ponty the flesh is the medium in which these relationships are made possible, and the linkage between them is not unidirectional but rather reversible, two-way, chiasmatic, “…once a body-world relationship is recognized, there is a ramification of my body and a ramification of the world and a correspondence between its inside and my outside, between my inside and its outside.”
There is more to tell than just a basic description of our kingfisher. (I can hear Jim scream out from his old, weather-faded yellow kayak, “Kingfishers!”) The act of writing about this specific moment must extend beyond the act of seeing to include the lived distance—the flesh—between the seer and the seen and the mutual relationship which results. If I with the written word go beyond visual details to tell you about being in the presence of the kingfisher and you read, listen, and imagine, something else occurs—flesh that has become word will become flesh again. And the flesh will be the same but different: our kingfisher will become your kingfisher.
The river is black and carries north before us, its mercury surface reflecting the sky, the day, the trees. Cypresses crowd the riverbank with their gray-brown tapered trunks. You notice toward the bottom of the trunk the black coloration where years of rising and sinking waters have scrawled their histories. And along these trees’ bark, dozens of epiphytes cling making a life of their own. Behind the light brown of cypress, the pure green of cabbage palm fronds stands out like flags waving in the breeze that rolls off the river.
A single cypress branch slings over the river like an arc connecting earth to sky, its rust-colored winter leaves hang down to mark the way and there, off that long stretch of limb, sits the kingfisher. So small it is a dot at first but it grows into something more, something alive, something particular. It sits looking west, its body a profile you study as you paddle closer and you begin to pick up on the details: the slate blue, the white collar and breast, the crest along the back of the head.
It doesn’t look at you, but you know it knows you’re there and the moment you consider this it takes off, diving down as if to feed but then swooping up and across the Ocklawaha’s black waters and then south and back around your cousin who turns his head to catch its flight and then around you. You wonder if it’s drawing a circle around you like some ancient ritual or perhaps attempting to articulate its care. Regardless, in this moment you realize the relationship extends beyond navigation to something more mysterious and primitive, something preceding language. Something that doesn’t require acknowledgement as it has always existed between life and life.
And then the kingfisher takes off, up the mirrored black waters past the next bend where other cypresses and cabbage palms are. Where another branch awaits the kingfisher and there on that spot, which has always been and will always be, the kingfisher approaches and takes its seat waiting on you, knowing you will come there to that place too.
Though the river flows and you journey further, though the kingfisher flies and makes its way forth, you realize that somehow time has disappeared or stopped or paused and for a few short strokes you float upon this earth untethered.
—
Early on our second morning, we came to a big bend in the Ocklawaha where an older man in a small aluminum bass boat was fishing by himself. The river was curved like a horseshoe and the man was in the pocket of the curve, anchored in front of a field of lily pads. The sun had not yet risen high enough to beat down upon the earth and a mist covered the river. The old man was fishing off the lily pads, throwing a plastic worm into the black waters to lure a hungry and unsuspecting largemouth bass (Micropterus salmoides). He was sitting on a grey swivel chair at the front of the boat.
When I saw him, I couldn’t help but think of the Fisher King. Also known as the Wounded King, the Fisher King is part of the larger King Arthur legend and is the last in the lineage of a group of guardians of the Holy Grail. This king has a wound in the groin, or thigh, which has led to his only being able to sit, which he does while fishing in a small boat on a river near his castle, Corbenic. The old king fishes day in day out, waiting for someone to come heal him.
It’s obvious to pick up on what the king’s wound implies in the larger legend: the loss of his “manhood,” of his ability to reproduce. Various strands of this story play on this woundedness. One modern retelling of the Fisher King is Jake Barnes from Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. Barnes’ woundedness—a war injury—is not as much about procreation as his ability to consummate his love for Brett Ashley. It is a different story and the focus has shifted, but the point is still the same: this dangling flesh, this sexual organ, is deeply identified with what makes a male. If you are broken there, you are supposedly not whole.
When I was first diagnosed with FSGS my doctor prescribed steroids. I was put on a large dose which led to various side effects—water retention in my face, acne, weight gain, mood swings. We ran tests a few weeks later to see if the steroids had any positive effect on my disease. They didn’t. My doctor then put me on immunosuppressants. Those didn’t work either. We then moved to chemotherapy—though most commonly used for cancer, chemotherapies are also used to treat specific kidney diseases. My doctor—a giant, hairy, self-assured man—notified me the specific chemo drug could cause infertility and suggested visiting a sperm bank before beginning my treatments. I was 25 and had no thought of my future, my focus then was on one thing—getting better.
About six months into our attempts to get pregnant, we decided to have my sperm tested. I picked up a sterile cup—neatly packaged inside a brown lunch bag—at a reproductive doctor’s office. A few days later, I woke up early in the morning and jacked off into the tiny cup—a daring, messy feat of accuracy. I then drove my little container to the reproductive doctor’s clinic and gave it to their lab technician. A week later we received word that my sperm count was way below normal and that my sperm morphology, too, was low.
I didn’t feel like Jake Barnes or the Fisher King. I didn’t feel like my “manhood” was affected. I felt sad for Taylor. I also was upset that we now had even more tests and doctor appointments before us. The last thing I wanted to do was see another doctor. Talk of IUIs and IVF filled the air and I quickly became overwhelmed. Trying naturally is easy and, mostly, fun. There’s not much to it besides timing and it’s always in the background. Moving to assisted reproduction put my fears at the forefront. I felt on the verge of a panic attack for days. But Taylor grabbed my hand and pulled me back into the present. There are rivers that flow into others, they blend and carry on.
—
Jim and I ended our trip just south of Lake Ocklawaha, a 15-mile-long reservoir and remnant of the never-finished Cross Florida Barge Canal. We had left my truck at a boat ramp there the day before. After getting out of the river, we unpacked our gear, dry bags, trash, and then strapped the kayaks to the roof. There was no ceremonious goodbye, we just got in the truck and drove off. We had paddled over 25 miles and the ride back to the Silver River and Jim’s truck was mostly quiet. I thought about the kingfisher and the strange sense of time that seemed to be slowly disappearing the further away we got from the Ocklawaha.
There are still plenty of questions and waiting and hope ahead for Taylor and me. We are still fumbling to work out our inscapes, still trying to bring life into this world. There are months of tests and shots and pills and prayer ahead. But in the moments now when I feel that terror rise—the terror of unknowns, the terror of too much—I stop and feel the slow black waters of the Ocklawaha pulsing idly by within me. I think of the kingfisher silently waiting around whatever bend is up ahead. The boldness of these memories transports me for a moment to that tree-marked wilderness where tannin waters reflect the sky. I pause and let loose another thanks. A thanks I let loose in spite of everything. One day the thanks will become everything.
***
Will Wellman is a writer and poet living in Nashville, Tennessee. His essays have been included in Longreads' "Best of Science and Nature" and in the forthcoming Best Spiritual Literature. He is at work on his first novel.