Low Water, and What It Hands Back

that boat was floating on tuesday. nobody moved it. the water moved.

The water is down. If you live on it you already know. If you do not, go stand at any landing in this basin and look at the line on the pilings where the water was in August, and then look at where it is now, and then look at what is lying on the mud in between.

This week, from readers, from the flats, from four different landings:

A rosary wound around a cypress knee, three turns, tight, like somebody meant it.

A license plate from 1974 with the screws still in it and no car anywhere.

A jar of coins half buried, lid on. The reader who found it did not open it. Nobody she showed it to would open it either. It is still there.

A skiff with no numbers, sitting level on the mud like it was set down, paint still tacky.

Now. DocFenwick is going to tell you, and he would be right, that October is low water every year, that it is the dry month, that a north wind pushes the water out of the basin and the river is low upstream and none of this is a mystery. I have read his megathread. All 998 of it. Doc is right about the water. Doc is never wrong about the water. Doc is just never asked about the jar.

So here is my theory, and I am telling you it is a theory: the basin tidies up before company. Every year, the month before All Saints, the water goes out and puts things on the mud where we can see them. Not to give them back. To show us what it has, so we know it is counting too.

If you find something on the flats, leave it. Take a picture if you have to. Write me which landing. Do not pick up the jar.

I relay. You decide.

In Truth and Terror.
— Beau