Roger Benham
He awoke to the sea of his youth renamed, a caprice of the new king. The name meant worse than nothing, a name which stretched from pole to pole, uprooting almost the very concept of itself, as if a double continent's word would be claimed by some small provincial mind which thought itself the whole when it was not even a part.
Would it change the leaping dolphins of his memory, the mangroves of his mind? Would it alter forever the place where he had once ventured, in a vanished time of strong arms and healthy lungs, amongst the alligators and the spoonbills, the drifting jellyfish and the diving sea turtles? Where once in a folly of long gone energies, never more to come, he had seen for an instant the flash of a shark's fin alongside his canoe, and gazed into the heavy lidded eye of a basking crocodile? How to change the rhymes of so many songs and the recalling of that conjuring phrase through endless northern winters, the promise of warm waters and distant vistas?
He had stood upon the mounds crafted through millenia before the sails of the galleons breached the sky. The hands that cleaved the oysters had never written the Spanish words, the mouths that ate the sea's harvest and built the islands had spoken other names as they kindled the distant fires at the water's edge.
What of the mind of the manatee or the scraping maw of the sawfish, dwelling in that place? How would they name their world to themselves?
Through the haze obscuring that western horizon, where the sea meets the setting Sun, one phrase echoed, from the writer who had set his path towards that wild coast, and the names which overlaid the shell mounds, built through eons: "Very few Calusa words survive."
(Black mangrove on the Gulf of Mexico, Ten Thousand Islands, South Florida)
Roger Benham is a canoeist, hiker and amateur naturalist. He lives in Vermont.
Brian's Homage to Mr. Wilson Playlist
Fred Neil ::: The Dolphins
Philip Glass :::: Evening Song from Satyagraha
The NHK Symphony :::Sibelius ::: The Swan of Tuonela
Joe Zawinul ::: In A Silent Way
Van Morrison :::: When Heart Is Open
Paul Horn ::: Haida
The Comedian Harmonists ::: Creole Love Call