ChapterTwo

The Flow

Constant motion, rotation, spinning, from where space and time do not exist, coming together, swirling apart, closer, distant, waves upon waves, light years, unseen, unknowable, pulsating, beyond reach and close at hand, microcosmic, reflecting, black holes, grains of sand, fingertips touching, beginnings and ends, and the infinite interregnum, of each breath, drop, and joule, each cell, in and out and touching, dividing and growing in the gravitational warmth of stars, mitosis, meiosis, ocean deep and mountain wind, efforts and dreams, and the flow, in constantmotion.

While there must be, there is no beginning, as far as we know it,the farther back we go the less we know, if we truly know anything at all, other than what we see and touch, and still in all likelihood do not fully understand, our history confined to a fingernail tip, prehistory, nothing at all unless written down, our vain conceit. Perhaps there is wisdom to be gained, but history would not repeat itself if we learned anything from it, accepting, choosing to rememberwhat flatters us, discarding, conveniently forgetting, lying about, or never writing down the ugly truths, the horrible sins, the stains we all bear, who we are, have been, and perhaps always will be. But the past appears to have the advantage of making us less lonely, less meaningless, prideful, in our selective memory, an enriching we seem to seek out, and apparently need, to justify, rationalize, elevate ourselves over others, and explain the unexplainable.

However the story is told, however reconstructed, and for whatever reason, beyond all wants, needs, and rationales, is the undeniable flow, the constant motion in real time, of water and blood, in rivers and veins, the tumultuous heaving, languid repose, rising, falling, pulse, the random design of mutations, that happen, and cannot be changed, moments, infinitely strung together over billions of years, in the point of time we call now, the time you take to read these words, the warmth of the sun, the creeping advance from water to shore, seed to flower, eruptions, ice, meteors, the fierce storms and gentle waves of Cambrian and Ordovician seas, the Paleozoic, Mesozoic, warming and cooling, the Pleistocene’s glacial advances, back and forth, time and again over millions of years, leaving markers upon the land, in Great Lakes, and small, brooks and streams, in sandstone and dolomite, and rushing water carving its course to the sea.

One such waterway, flowing just to the north of the hill on which Dan Hurley’s body lies, begins humbly, as mighty rivers do, from small springs that bubble from aquifers below impassable swamps in the North Woods, filling a lake left by glaciers, overflowing in a brook, remote, unexceptional, out-of-the-way peaceful, where the waters escape into marsh and reed, and onward, gathering as they travel, mile after mile, swelling slowly with each tributary along the way, transforming, from brook to stream to river wide, over 430 miles, generally south to southwest, through meanders and rapids, oxbows and gorges, rushing, ebbing, past bluff and field, falling 1,067 feet along the way to its mouth, where it flows into theMississippi.

The lake of the river’s origin, itsveritas caput, the Ojibwe (Chippewa) calledGete-gitigaani-zaaga’igan, Lake of the Old Garden, Lac Vieux Desert to the French, which it is known as today. The Woodland Sioux, precursors to the Ojibwe, no doubt called it a different na