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Chapter 15 energy I got to Energy at 10:30, just as the waxing crescent moon was about to drop below the horizon of the swamp I was heading for. It blazed orange on its slow descent, as if aflame. The stars shone in great numbers, crisp in their celestial grandeur. Flashes troubled the horizon all around, and thunderous rumbling signaled that the last pseudo-weaponry of July 4, 2011, was being expended in a frenzied patriotic orgasm. A big splash, like a bowling ball dropped into the water, made me wonder what was out there, what I’d see and hear tonight. I considered getting into the car and driving back to the farmhouse to go to bed, yet something drove me forward, a curiosity about the night life of the Crooked Creek swamp that I’d already invaded the day before. I anointed myself in bug spray and attached my headlamp, vowing not to use it unless I really had to, on the theory that my eyes would adjust to the moonless night. The water seemed thicker at night, my paddle strokes quieter, as I tried to minimize extraneous movements. I cinched up my uncomfortable life vest and advanced upon the darkness. Having paddled Energy in the daytime, I knew that finding its liminal zone at night would be an ambitious goal, near impossible, even though the entryway was marked by two trees that had fallen together, making a sort of cross, or X. After that, I entered a full-scale natural labyrinth, challenging even in the daytime, the hedges and grass islands forming multiple passages. It seemed as if I were entering the rooms to a large house that were separated by narrow hallways . Often, I’d paddle until the walls of vegetation closed in and the passageway transformed itself from creek to ditch to watery meadow. Sometimes the rising of the muddy bottom would stop me. Finally, I followed a sort of zigzag pattern and scooted over a low spot to an island where beaver had built a house of sticks and mud. I could hear some work going on within, like someone patting the mud 178 Energy with the flat of his hand. Just beyond the house a small raccoon sat staring at me. He retreated a few feet and peeked around the stick house. Just a bit beyond it, a big crashing noise and a series of splashes told me I’d flushed a deer, and as I continued following this course, the deer huffed repeatedly in that shrill voice that sounds like a mix of anger, fear, and exasperation, an expulsion of air that comes from deep in the throat. I disturbed the same heron a couple of times, and its cries seemed supersonic in the quiet, closed-in area. High above, a woodpecker launched into a project with such force it seemed as if it were swinging a hatchet against the trunk of the sycamore. I expected the tree to fall at any moment. Now, at night, I paddled near the bank below the campground, still a mile or so from the crossed trees. Up on the hillside three shapes sat beside a campfire talking, two lower voices—young men—and one higher voice that I imagined belonged to a young, impressionable boy. I heard the word scary a few times, but I could make out little else. The tone of the conversation was sober but intense. “Is that a boat down there?” the higher voice asked the others. “Is there someone down there?” asked one of the deeper voices. “Just me,” I said. “Hope I didn’t scare you.” I wondered what I looked like, what I sounded like from up there in the glow of the campfire, on solid ground. There were a few security lights in the vicinity, but I felt much more obscured than they, and if this were the Civil War and I part of an attacking amphibious force, I don’t see how they could have prepared for my attack. On the other hand, a warship would probably not be bright yellow. As it was, it probably gave them something to talk about for a while: the crazy guy in the kayak, going where, doing what? Alone . . . at night. Energy had none of the sentimental trappings of Hematite, none of the personal history. The dam, an earthen structure reinforced by limestone riprap like the spillway at Hematite, was a half-mile long with a road running...

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