Of Leaf, Wing, and Water

By Stephen Diana

"I am about to tell you a story I don't yet understand.

Wonder and Mystery will be among its main characters..."

How far do ripples travel after a pebble is dropped into a pond? And how profoundly can a simple message-even one that is vague and of question

• Language: English
• Publisher: New Degree Press
• Release date: Mar 4, 2023
• ISBN: 9798889266891

Book preview

Author’s Note

Sometimes I wonder if we humans are shaped so fundamentally by the stories we tell ourselves and one another that we can’t even see it has happened. Our view of the world and the spiritual have been handed to us by our forebears over generations, and we couldn’t see things differently if we were to try. Most of us raised in a monotheistic belief system, for example, can’t even begin to feel the world as something alive and aware, as an animist would. We modern, mobile people also will never know a land with the depth of one whose people have lived on it for thousands of years, and for whom every stone, grove, and curve of a stream has a name and a known history.

Our stories lock our frames of reference and make us certain about things that aren’t certainly true, simply because we can’t imagine them to be otherwise. We create certainty from mystery because mystery is difficult to tolerate. Our minds crave understanding and knowledge of mechanisms so we can assure ourselves the future is secure and that we have some degree of predictability and safety; that we know what is going on.

There was a time when I, too, had a level of certainty about what was true, right, and real, but I was young then and knew less than I do now. As I grew and aged, I came to accept uncertainty, not because I lost capacity but because I gained experience. I learned it takes knowledge, wisdom, and curiosity to recognize the limits of one’s understanding, and it takes humility and courage to embrace them.

I have come to believe I am surrounded by mystery. My sense of wonder isn’t quelled in the least by the fact that the tools of science can reduce the natural world to mechanistic explanations. That the universe came to be from a colossal explosion from nothingness, that life sprang from a sterile world, and that trees communicate and support one another through underground networks of roots and fungi—all of these are greater and more wondrous than any explanations that could be given. The awareness of them becomes a mystical experience.

The spiritual, of course, is even less knowable, or perhaps absolutely unknowable. As humans we want answers. We want to know that there is or isn’t a god. If there is, we want to know who or what God is and what God does or doesn’t approve of or love. We want to know where we come from and what happens to us and those we love after we die. There would be security in that knowledge, but it is stubbornly elusive. I have learned to accept that the spiritual is a mystery I will never be able to pierce. That is, perhaps, the most certain of all truths.

This story began as an exercise in curiosity for me at a time in my life when I felt particularly lost. I began writing a short story about a man whose mistakes were manifold and consistent and who received what he believed to be a call from God to do something, without that something being specified. He tried one thing after another, only to fail miserably. And then, in his final attempt and his greatest failure of all, something of significance was accomplished. It was to be an exploration of the idea that God, whoever God may be, might use our very frailties and failures to achieve God’s purpose. It was to be a peek at the notion that God may use the lost, weak, and powerless, rather than the accomplished and potent, to change the world.

As I wrote sporadically over a number of years, the project morphed, seemingly of its own volition, into a novel. It became less about weakness and failure and more about mystery and the limits of our understanding, our need to drift with the current rather than fight for solid footing. And threads appeared about some of the things I know, or choose to believe, are possible and true: that the natural world reaches out her mossy hand if we stop to pay attention, that the most damaged among us has the longing for and possibility of belonging and redemption, and that we can rescue one another. I didn’t expect to end up here, but there it is. It has been a ride.

I write about several religious groups and communities in this book, and I do so with respect. My uncertainty and wondering doesn’t make me hostile to faith or to those who have it. Although this story isn’t consistent with one belief system, my hope is that people of faith will feel welcomed as they read it.

This work is deeply autobiographical although I don’t appear in it; nor does anyone I have known. Still, the people from my memory make me who I am, and they and I inhabit the characters and sentiments of the story; a fragment here, a color there, an offhand comment, gesture, or joke. In addition, I couldn’t create a fictional family and community of friends without imagining it in the small village in which I grew up. I changed the names of towns and many landmarks in the story, but those familiar with the place will recognize their hometown. Central to the location is Kinderhook Creek, which runs through that village and beside which I spent a great deal of time as a boy. It holds a powerful presence in my mind and in the story, and for that reason I chose to leave its name unchanged.

The story centers on Jesse, a boy who receives mysterious and supposedly divine messages of dubious authenticity. He senses a calling and struggles to make sense of this and to live faithfully to what he believes may be true. His very searching shapes him as he grows up and affects the people around him in ways both unexpected and profound. It eventually pulls together people in deep need of rescuing and who are available to rescue one another.

I set out to write a story with a lot of heart in it. Sometimes it’s pretty, but not always. Heart and life, like nature itself, can be beautiful and breathtaking but also messy, savage, and painful. They are unpredictable and sometimes dangerous. I spare neither myself nor the reader from that. I consider it an honest way to wade into the stream of Jesse’s life and of the lives of those close to him. If we are all swept away in the current, so much the better. Sometimes losing our footing is what we need most.

I am honored to birth Of Leaf, Wing, and Water into this world. Whoever you are and by whatever path you arrived here, I invite you to wander about in this story and let it take you where it will.

Prologue and Lay of the Land

Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.

—Søren Kierkegaard

I am about to tell you a story I don’t yet understand. Wonder and Mystery will be among its main characters. Although the events I write about occurred many years ago, they continue to make demands from where they hover just outside my comprehension. They insist I accept that some things I know to be true can’t be explained and that many questions lack answers. Under their influence, I have even had to consider that true beauty exists only in the margins of what can be understood. They may ask the same of you.

The story takes place in a specific location, one that must be known. The landscape of the place plays an active role in the tale’s tumble and flow and shapes the characters who inhabit it, all of us—Jesse, Ricky, Melissa, our families and friends, and, of course, me. It is the landscape I have internalized and carry with me to this day, a small village in New York State surrounded by forest, fields, and scattered houses and run through by a network of brooks and streams. I ask you to pause with me as I take a few moments before beginning the story to introduce you to this place.

*****

The village of Lovell lies at the junction of Route 77, Tilden Road, and Tyler Road. The three roads define the small triangular village square, formed because Tilden and Tyler Roads cross about thirty yards before both run into Route 77. For as long as I can remember, Al Kaufmann mowed the square in the summer and stored in his garage the half-size nativity figures that were set up there before every Christmas. I always assumed he did this because he lived right next to it and wanted to keep the area trim. He kept his yard mowed clean and dandelion-free, a rare thing around Lovell. I thought he simply couldn’t tolerate disorder near his house and groomed the square to maintain the rightness of things. Now that I think of it, though, the town or county must have paid him some nominal fee to do it. It was, after all, the village square, not his own. I haven’t seen that square or Al Kaufmann for at least thirty-five years. Al had a stroke before I left, but he was back at it fairly promptly. You don’t have to speak without a slur to mow the lawn and keep a tidy square.

The post office sits across Tilden Road from the square. It is a fifteen-foot square room with a bell on the door, FBI most wanted posters on the wall, a small bank of post office boxes, and a little counter. In all my life, I can’t remember ever being in that building with another customer. Alice Thomason was the postmistress when I lived in Lovell. I remember she would speak at length about any subject: family, news, religion, weather. It was no easy thing to leave the post office gracefully. Alice didn’t let go easily, but she was kind and not one who invited rudeness.

The village of Lovell is home to roughly a hundred people, and maybe another hundred live within Lovell proper but scattered outside the village center. Most of the houses are south of the square, along Tyler Road, and are at least seventy-five years old. No one, excluding Al, keeps a manicured lawn, but then few in the village value grass like people do in suburbs. We don’t even notice crabgrass.

On Tyler Road is an old synagogue someone converted into a house many years ago although I never met a Jew living in Lovell. This didn’t puzzle me as a boy since it was all I knew. Didn’t all villages have a synagogue with no Jews? I only recently found out that Jews had been among the first residents of the village and had subsequently moved on, which explained the presence of Gentile Road outside the village. I imagine the first gentiles to settle the area must have lived out there, and the Jewish inhabitants of the village must have named the road after their more distant and peculiar neighbors.

The general store by itself comprises the commercial part of Lovell and sits to the north of the square on Route 77. The store’s name changed three times in my life as different families bought and sold it. Last I knew, it was Holliston’s, and maybe it still is. The store has two gas pumps and floor space about the area of a good-sized living room. You can buy most of what you might need in a pinch there if you are willing to pay considerably more than you would at the IGA ten miles away in Jordan. The Hollistons added a little dining area onto the store several years before I moved away, and Mrs. Holliston would cook up a hot breakfast for deer hunters and fishermen during the season.

Next door to Holliston’s Store is the old barn that houses the trucks for the volunteer fire department and the whistle that goes off each day at noon. The responsibility for operating the whistle falls in the lap of whoever owns the general store, since the switch is behind the counter. I remember learning this one day when I was in the store at noon, and Mrs. Mitchell, the co-owner back when it was Mitchell’s Store, set off the noon whistle by throwing what looked like a light switch on the wall. That something so small as that switch and her slender finger could make such a huge sound billow from the barn next door amazed me. I remember it vividly though the incident was half a lifetime ago.

Snake Hill overlooks the village like a sentinel. It is a steep hill with a sheer cliff that, despite its name, seems to hold no snakes at all, none I could ever find at any rate. The landscape of the region is rolling, with only a few substantial hills here and there, so a cliff is an oddity and something that begs to be climbed, especially by boys with a lot of time on their hands in the summer. From the top, you can see most of the village looking impossibly tiny below. Approaching the edge of the cliff is frightening, which, of course, means it must be done. The drop isn’t terribly far as cliffs go but is plenty far enough to pulverize someone were they to go over it and land on the rocks below. That is part of the attraction. The clifftop is a perfect place for wasting time in the summer and waiting for hawks to wing by looking for an updraft.

Tyler Road parallels Kinderhook Creek, and the backyards of the houses on the west side of the road end near the creek bank. The Kinderhook is great for trout fishing in spring and early summer. More skilled fisherman than me fish it all summer long and into the fall, but I never had much luck past June when the water begins to warm.

After my short fishing season, the stream is warm enough to swim in on a hot day. There are two swimming holes in the Kinderhook as it goes through Lovell. One is across from the Baptist Church on Route 77, about a quarter mile west of the square. It is a deep hole where the water hesitates and darkens. To get to it, you need to walk across the lawn of the manse. I’m sure it is private property, but I never once heard anyone complain about the foot traffic or worry about whether or not it was allowed. The church was evangelical, and signs were nailed to trees along the creek bank with scripture quotes, King James translation, of course. A captive audience for evangelism in exchange for access to the swimming hole seemed an agreeable deal to all involved. When I was a boy, we had swimming lessons in that hole, and they often took place when the weather was gray, cold, and rainy. I swam there many times on hot days when the water was wonderful, but when I think of that spot now, I remember swimming lessons, and goosebumps rise on my skin.

The second swimming area is known as The Falls and was my favorite. It runs next to a fisherman’s access point right in the middle of the village, a little upstream from the Baptist church. The Falls is a spot where Kinderhook Creek, about forty feet wide at that point, pours over a rambling rock formation that stretches from bank to bank. As I remember, there are three waterfalls at low water and many more when the creek rises in the spring. Although, during some really wet springs, I have seen water obliterate the rocks and fly over in a single roar. Two of the three waterfalls are drops of maybe six feet, ending in deep pools about ten feet wide and twenty feet long. You can swim in the pools if no one is fishing there already, and while I was swimming underwater in one of them with Jesse we decided The Falls should be the eighth wonder of the world. The water is crystal clear when not muddied by spring rains, and the rock formations beneath it are intricate. From underwater, the pattern of bubbles formed by the stream pouring into the pool against a backdrop of stone is a wonder to behold.

The third drop carries most of the water over The Falls but is more a rapid than a waterfall, with an angle of maybe forty-five degrees. We held that rapid in great respect and were careful to stay away from its inflow. When I was a young teenager, there were rumors that some older boys from the village had gone over it in an inner tube. This caused a great deal of headshaking among my friends although I wasn’t sure I believed it. If it was true, I am sure it involved alcohol.

Another small swimming hole is situated on the upstream side of the rock that forms The Falls. This is perhaps the easiest one to get to and the most heavily used. It is narrow, and if you like to pretend you are a trout and skim the bottom with your chest, as I do, you have to be careful not to bang your hands on the stones on either side. Some people like to lather themselves up and bathe in this pool. It always bothered me to see them sending soap suds into the creek, but they were usually big hairy guys. I wasn’t about to talk to them about taking care of the environment.

Besides fishing and swimming, the Kinderhook is great for tubing. Unfortunately, the best time to be in the water is in July and August, when the air is hottest but the water is lowest and the tubing most difficult. The creek is rocky and shallow in sections, so an inattentive tuber who lets his ass drop through the middle of the tube returns home bruised and stiff from collisions of buttocks with rocks. Also, stretches that are exciting rapids to run in the spring are too shallow to float at all in late summer and have to be portaged. Fortunately, inner tubes are light, and we had all day.

In my mind, the very best section of the Kinderhook to tube begins at The Falls, parallels Tyler Road and then Route 77 for about a mile, passes the Baptist church, and then pulls away from any road and follows a valley for what must be at least five miles. It circles around behind Snake Hill for part of the way before it comes to a bridge where Route 30 crosses it. That section of the creek is a private world, a place where you are unlikely to see anyone but the people tubing with you. I imagine it looks the same as it has for the last ten thousand years, except the trees are second-growth. I used to think of this place as Eden, my own private paradise to which I could run or float, where I was master of all I surveyed. If someone had put a road into the creek and built a house there, I would have considered them trespassers. The stretch always looked like it would be good to fish, with lots of pools interspersed with riffles, and big rocks and logs to provide shelter. But I only managed to fish the upper end of it, and that only with a great deal of effort. It is not easily accessible on foot, and it is difficult to hold a fishing rod and paddle an inner tube at the same time.

It seems like I tubed almost incessantly some summers with Jesse and Ricky, and the inside of my upper arms became red and sore where they rubbed on the tube as I paddled. When we could scrape up enough money and get someone to buy them for us, we would tie six-packs of beer to our tubes and let them float in the water behind us. We would drink it, spinning in our tubes under the hot sun with our asses hanging in the water, belching as loudly as we possibly could. You could be filthy rich and spend a lot of money and still not have anywhere near as much fun as that.

Our elementary school was in the village and held one class each of kindergarten through sixth grade. My memories of that school and time are patchy. Ted, the janitor, had a cot in the basement and may, for all I know, have actually lived there. He sprinkled stuff on the floor and swept it up, and he sold ice cream sandwiches to us from the freezer for a dime or half for a nickel. Mr. Polowski, the principal, had a wooden paddle with holes drilled through it, presumably to cut down on wind resistance to increase the force of impact with juvenile behinds. The boys’ room had urinals we once pissed on top of just because we could, a choice that led to an ugly encounter with Mr. Polowski’s paddle.

The school closed in 1970 or so when it and several others were consolidated into a new, larger school in Jordan. It then fell into disrepair, and the grass on the playground—where we once climbed the jungle gym, rode the merry-go-round, and played softball—grew long and shaggy. I believe several people tried to put the building to use over the years, but the last time I saw it, it still seemed like a stray in need of a bath and a home.

Jesse, Ricky, and I each lived about a mile outside the village. Green Brook ran across the road from Jesse’s house and emptied into the Kinderhook about a mile downstream. The brook was about eight feet across at best but held a lot of small trout that were pretty easy to catch if you crawled up to the bank without spooking them. But I’ve already said enough about fishing.

Because the three of us were not from the village itself and didn’t hang out with the people in the square, both they and we saw us as outsiders. It didn’t help that our families all moved there when we were very young while most people in the village had been born there. We didn’t quite fit the mold, which was fine with us. For the most part, we just hung out with each other.

That’s the village of Lovell, at least what I remember of it. When I left it for college and then moved a little distance away, I was glad to get out. But now that I am gone, as so often happens, I miss it. Although my roots in that area are relatively shallow, having lived there for only twenty-five years or so, they are the deepest I have anywhere. Adults don’t have time to tube creeks, find little Edens, or stalk trout on their hands and knees, at least not much. They have too many responsibilities to be discovering secret places and the eighth wonder of the world. Unless they stay where they grew up, they never again have those places ringing with memory to which they can retreat and think things out.

*****

This story has been rolling about in my mind for many years, and the time has finally come to put it down on paper. Some of this I will have to piece together from bits and pieces of hazy memory from long ago, and some is branded on my mind and will never dim, let alone be forgotten. Some portions will be from my own experience and others from what I was told by Jesse, Ricky, and our families and friends. The remainder will come from what I believe must have been. I feel compelled to write this out. Perhaps I want to consolidate my memories or understand some of what has made me who I