CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
A Change in Plans
Bob Tom Damall admits that he has done many stupid things in his life. He left the mountains of Tennessee instead of staying with kith and kin. He went to MIT instead of TSU. He studied molecular neurology instead of re-forestry. He worked for Bionatics instead of taking the job with Opti-Global. He left that lucrative job at Bionatics instead of lying to the investigators from CDC. After being black-balled and retreating from those wars, instead of clearing his name, he had pursued a Ph. D. in political philosophy at Harvard. He had taken the job at Yale instead of Ohio State. It was at Yale that he had his epiphany and, once again, recreated himself—as a forest prophet. Then, instead of retreating from the battlefield, when wisdom screamed to do so, he had married Rholealy. He had lived crazily in the cave with those crazy women instead of taking Blesonus and going back to Tennessee. He had made a big mistake rescuing Noby One, and made a bigger one by abandoning him, and, now, probably, was making the biggest by changing his mind again and going back to find the naïve teener.
The decision to turn back, however, isn’t made by the old riverman until he is north of Poughkeepsie. He has been leaning over the stern rail on an empty veg barge, staring at the churning water below to distract himself from his guilt, when, abruptly, he sees something in the murky brown froth five meters below his feet which he divines as if it were a scattering of tea leaves.
His fate, maybe inexplicably, but indubitably, is bound to the boy’s.
Seconds later, Bob Tom is twenty meters in the air and heading southeast toward the Connecticut coast. The message he has received is so powerful that it won’t allow him to fly back down the Hudson, across the Manhattan and out Long Island. Instead he will make a bee-line toward the Connecticut coast and cut across Long Island Sound. He knows where the coordinates they have been given lead and he also knows that Joe, somehow, despite the folly, is on his way there. Even as he contemplates the folly of an old man, a tired old man with nascent doubts and resurgent fears, of flying across kilometers of open water, he knows that Noby’s salvation, as well as his own, depend upon him making that journey.
After the sedentary hours he has spent on the barge, Bob Tom’s body feels fresher and stronger than it has since the night before he pulled Noby to safety. His wings beat strong and steady atop the eight knot westerly wind. However, regardless of how steady those wing beats are, Bob Tom’s mind is in turmoil. The attack of fear outside the African’s subway sanctuary caused a crack in that ancient vessel and that crack has spider-webbed until the contents, so tightly held inside for years and years, are spilling free.
It has been almost a half-century since Robert Thomas O’Malley has flown along the Connecticut coast. He is amazed at the changes carved in the shoreline by the rising waters. He can see that most of what had been called the Gold Coast is gone. He assumes that those expensive homes were too expensive to preserve. The new coastline from Darien to Bridgeport is mostly barren sand and rock with an outline of scrub. From two hundred meters, Bob Tom can see that this section of the almost unbroken band of shoreline sprawl, which once ran from Delaware to north of Boston, has moved twenty kilometers inland. The coast-hugging sections of that once venerable highway of progress, Route 95, has been chopped out and stitched back together beyond the twenty kilometer limit. Looking at the ruins, the geri winger can see some of that civilization had been snatched back by rising waters, and some had been flattened by federal fiat and bulldozers, but most simply had crumbled away from economic desuetude and neglect.
In New Haven, even though the cranes and tank farms, which he remembers covering much of the harbor like yellow and silver algae, are gone, the high hills which shape the Housatonic are still occupied. When the old winger swivels his head to study the divided community high on the hills, their turrets and towers remind him of Buda and Pest. When he realizes what he is seeing, the old man bursts into laughter.
The Elis. Arrogant Elis. Yale University, intellectual mother of presidents and their pawns, though defeated, has refused to surrender. New Haven, sacred New Haven, might have fallen to the rising seas. Yale, however, has taken her billions and made a tactical retreat to higher ground.
Bob Tom’s laugh nearly carries across the river.
When he gets to Bluff Point, Bob Tom lands and rests, drinks and eats. Ever since he left Joe in Queens and made his escape, he has felt that he is doomed. How his fate will manifest itself he doesn’t know, but a deep part of him, a part different from and far wiser than his intellect, knows his life is done. Surprisingly, that knowledge does not weigh as heavily on him as he would have guessed. Although there have been many moments of joy in the Adirondacks, on, above, and alongside her rivers and mountains, those singular moments have been outweighed by a profound loneliness, a recognition of his life as caricature, a sense of the emptiness of his acts.
After the winger catches his breath and gets back into the air, he looks out over the sun silvered water and recalls when and where he was, and how he felt when he made the decision to enter the verdant half-world of the mountains as a Ph.D.-burdened reincarnation of Tolkien’s jolly woodsman, Tom Bombadil.
…He had been grading term papers for his graduate seminar, Machiavelli in a Non-Machiavellian World. In a way, the seminar had been no more than a retelling of the tale of the serpent in the garden. Is evil irresistibly attractive? All nine of his students, the brightest master students in Yale’s political science department, had argued that evil could be resisted. He had finished his grading, stacked the papers alphabetically, and, then, reread the conclusion of each student. When he finished he knew that one of two things must be true. Either he was a miserable failure as a teacher or he was a miserable failure as a citizen of the world.
Robert O’Malley had pondered which might be the correct answer. Some of that pondering had been done in long walks along the same coastline he has just flown over. He can remember walking barefooted in the sand at Hawk’s Nest Beach with his wings tightly furled to keep the turbulent off-shore breezes from flaring them.
When the thirty-eight year old professor had decided that he was the owner of a scarred soul without ever having had life wound it, he resigned from Yale. Deciding that truth was more apt to be found in fiction, he spent the summer reading novels in a New Hampshire cabin perilously perched on an outcrop looking out at the north face of Cannon Mountain. Summer ended, but he kept reading Leaves fell and he read on. Finally at first snow, he stopped. He looked around at the stacks and mounds of books and decided that, of all the stories which he had read, of all the characters with whom he had become acquainted, Tom Bombadil, a minor character in the Lord of the Ring, was the most attractive.
Some critics, and Tolkien himself, had indicated that Bombadil was god-like, a Beginner, a First. Although Robert Thomas O”Malley had plenty of ego, he certainly didn’t think that he was god-like; however if the ring represented power, then he wanted to be like Bombadil, who was not affected by the ring. Over the next months, the former professor read Tolkien’s poems about Bombadil as well as books on forest-craft, fishing and hunting. He went on two Inward Unbound retreats and played Professor Higgins to his own un-Pygmalion.
Then, like Thoreau, he went to the woods to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, to see if he could learn what it could teach and not, when he came to die, discover that he had not lived.
Now, decades later, he regrets his efforts. In a sense he has not lived. He had learned the ways of fish and fowl, but had learned little about himself. He had been a well-met hale fellow to his own soul. Blustery, boisterous, always positive, he had whistled his ways through the years. Until now.
As Bob Tom continues east along the Connecticut coast and the waters of Long Island Sound, he increases his altitude. He finally stops climbing at five hundred meters. A half century ago he could fly long distances at a thousand meters. With his skinwings, that altitude gave him the longest distance at the greatest economy of energ
y. Now, the effort to get to half that height far exceeds the energy savings once he has arrived. His wings have changed shape as he has aged, the same as his legs and hands, and that alteration in the shape of the leathery air foil has had big consequences in the efficiency with which way he can fly.
The reasons Bob Tom has flown so much higher than he has in years are two-fold—knowledge and insurance. He wants to study the far-off Long Island shoreline so that he can pick the closest point as a destination. And, he wants to give himself as much time as possible when things go wrong—which he knows will happen. From higher in the air, he can see farther and have a better chance of spotting a boat to land on when his wings, or will, fail. However, despite any precautions he may take, deep in his bones, the old man knows that this is going to be a one-way flight. He thinks how Voltaire was right when he had old Dr. Pangloss stay home and tend his garden. That he would like to do, but the part of him he has spent years creating won’t let him.
An hour later, far ahead off to his right, Bob Tom sees what he realizes must be Fisher Island. His decides to fly to the island and rest before he continues on to Long Island.
For more than a century Fisher’s had been a summer home and refuge for those too rich or well-bred to go to Martha’s Vineyard. When the world’s waters began to rise, many of those Fisher families lost their homes. Much like the victorious but spent British after World War Two who, with a certain defeated grace, had allowed their colonies to go, so, too, had the denizens of Fishers mostly eschewed any rear-guard action. Instead of fighting for what once was a sanctuary, a preserve of wealth, they had accepted their losses to a changed world.
As Bob Tom approaches the sanctuary, where he once had spent an uncomfortable weekend at the invitation of a fourth generation Yale legacy undergraduate, he is surprised at just how small the island has become. Few remaining houses. No landing strip that he can see. He wonders if there are summer nights now where there is no fourth for bridge.
By the time he crosses onto the island, the old winger is flying at fifty meters. It seems to him to be much less green that his memories. The land is mostly grays and browns except for what he sees are the bleached bones of thousands upon thousands of deer skeletons. As he comes over a small ridge, Bob Tom looks down on a herd of emaciated deer drinking from Buckland Pond. It hits the old man how a life without enemies can spell death. Other than the last years with Rholealy, his enemies have been confined to bear and briers. He understands how the lack of struggle has weakened him.
Bob Tom flies past the herd until he comes to a rocky spine where he lands. He stays twenty minutes catching his breath and fighting off a deprezzion which is enveloping him like dense fog.
The second leg of his flight across Long Island Sound, despite failing light and stiff winds blowing out of the southwest, goes smoothly. When he lands on the desolate coast of Long Island’s north shore, he is tired, but not spent. His reckoning tells him that he has almost another thirty kilometers to fly. With dusk descending and anticipating an expanse of scrub broken only by ponds, streams and swamps, Bob Tom decides that it makes sense for him to spend the night on the beach.
The old man walks the wrack line looking for an indentation in the sand which will provide some shelter. After he finds one that is suitable, he collects sticks and wedges them into the ground to make a frame over which he drapes dried sea grass and ribbons of bleached kelp.
Although it takes more time than he normally would allocate for so temporary a shelter, the old man doesn’t begrudge himself his efforts. It passes the time and, to a small extent, keeps his thoughts at bay. When his home is ready, the thoughts return.
He is dying. He accepts that. That knowledge is not news. What is different is the plaintive acquiescence. That acceptance is new. And that is wrong. His origins are in a place where living demands a tenacious grip. For more than eighty years he has known, and accepted that. He has held tight with an acrobat’s hands, hard-callused and sinewy-muscled hands. Until now.
The old man waves his hands at the encroaching dark to disperse his thoughts. He gathers driftwood, hums, sings, lights his fire and feels a long lost joy at watching driftwood flames colored bright by the ocean’s minerals. When his first wood begins to die, he gathers more and more again until his profligate flames light the shore around him and add a golden tint to the pair of eyes watching him through dense scrub.
Finally, as the moon begins its fall and his sadness has spent itself, the old man drifts into sleep. As the rasp and hack of the winger’s breathing breaks across the sibilance of waves lapping on sand, his watcher, Mortos, builds his own gossamer dreams.
Bob Tom’s body wakes refreshed, but his soul remains fatigued. While he chews his leathery breakfast, he paces the shore. He feels like an ancient agitated Agamemnon girding for war.
It is as he nears a thustle of rose hips that Bob Tom sees the hoof prints. No one hunts for decades without being watched himself, but Damall’s spirits sink even lower when he realizes that he has been surveyed from less than twenty meters from where he has supped, sung and slept. If he is going into battle, which is what his nerve endings think, then it is not reassuring to know that he is so ill-prepared. The old man tells himself that if he had not built the crackling fire so high, and if the waves had not been breaking on the shore, he would have heard the horse.
Bob Tom is in the air flying over sinuous streams and tussocks of scrub when he claps his hands in sudden awareness. The horse had not been watching him. It, like Bob Tom, himself, had been sleeping. No horse ever stands in place for any length of time unless it is sleeping. As soon as the thought comes to him, some of the riverman’s feelings of unease fall away as if they were no more than a pinion torn free by a huffing wind.
Despite feeling lighter and being intrigued with a landscape, which, if it were further south, he was sure could be called bayou, Bob Tom pays close attention to where he will land if something should go wrong. The ancient winger’s shoulders ache from yesterday’s work and his heart is racing as he nears the coordinates the Africans had given to Joe. It comes to him that he has assumed that his destination would be something recognizable, such as an abandoned building, dock or a meadow. But, as far as he can see, there is nothing but a uniform of green decorated with shiny ribbons and medals of water. The old man circles twice over his destination without seeing a place to land. As he comes around a third time, he thinks that the African women have deceived Joe and himself.
Why wouldn’t they? Why would they trust two males? Two strangers? The Africans would have thought that if the girl really needed help, then she would have contacted them herself.
Bob Tom realizes that he and Joe have been sent on a wild goose chase. His anger at being deceived only lasts a moment. Almost immediately he is relieved. He is not going into battle today. He has tried to help the girl. He has done what he could. No longer is he duty bound. He can fly home to his simple life. He can see Blesonus and need not feel shame.
Something about the sleeping horse has continued to bother Bob Tom as he flies. It is not until he has crimped his wings so that he can land on a small weedy spur of land jutting into a five meter wide stream that it comes to him that the horse might have stayed still, not because it was asleep, but because a rider had held it still. A rider on horseback is something the old man hasn’t seen in years. Something about a watcher on horseback, something he thinks may tie into hobbit travels through Middle-earth, makes Bob Tom hold his breath as he tries to look through the thick foliage which surrounds him. Too tired to fly, too hinky to stay on the small outcropping, Bob Tom carefully slides down the two meter embankment and begins walking down the ankle deep clear water of the stream. He hasn’t walked more than a half-klik when something flies out of the woods above him and drops over his head. Before he understands what has happened, a second lasso shooting out from the other side of the bank secures him.
At first, the ancient riverman struggles to free himself, but those efforts cause t
he tips of his wings to get wet. After a few seconds, the fatalistic riverman calms himself and waits for his captors to show themselves.