The sandpiper — Paul Wallace

Flint River at Sprewell Bluff Park, Upson County, Georgia

———

The river is my savior, she’s running to the sea

and to reach her destination is to simply cease to be

and running till you’re nothing sounds a lot like being free

so I’ll lay myself inside her and let her carry me

Jason Isbell

———

KRISTEN, OUR YOUNGEST CHILD, has been thinking about death lately. The other day we were eating lunch and she asked me if it was okay if she thought that maybe nothing happens after we die. Maybe, she said, it’s just like going to sleep.

I said yes it’s okay if you think that.

The truth is, I’m mostly with her. My scientific training leaves little room for the idea of heaven. Christianity’s insistence on the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting stands so flatly at odds with the scientific consensus regarding the nature and fate of the cosmos that I, an ordained minister who has written multiple books about the compatiblity of science and religion, have no idea what to do with this question. So I have simply taken the idea of heaven and put it on a shelf.

Sometimes, when I am feeling shaken and creaturely, I take it down and play with it a little. I might think of sitting by the lake of an evening sharing a single malt with Dad or stalking painted buntings at the coast with Mom. Each of us a little more healthy, the sky a little more starry, the Scotch a little more smoky, the live oaks a deeper shade of green. Everything about one and a half times more lovely than in this present life; that’s all the heaven I can imagine. A blessed hope. Here at middle age the idea seems a little less ludicrous to me than it used to, but mostly I just don’t think about it.

I do think about dying, though, and more than I care to admit. I once heard someone tell a story about an organ concert. He enjoyed the performance, except for one thing: the organ had a stuck note. It was quiet but it was always there. At first he could only hear it in the silences between pieces. When the music returned everything was ok. But his ear eventually tuned in to the note and he could hear it even when the music was playing. By the end of the concert the soft but incessant tone was all he could hear, present even in loud passages, and he was relieved when it was over. The note transformed what should have been a lovely affair into an ordeal.

I pray that I might come to a place where I do not wake up in the middle of the night to the stuck note of my own death.

A few days after my conversation with Kristen I woke before sunrise and left my sleeping family behind. Half an hour later I was on Interstate 75 heading south out of Atlanta, the sun balanced on the earth’s eastern rim like an enormous five ball. Some miles to the west, the Flint River was running through broad shadowed valleys, never once crossing an interstate or passing through a major city.

The Flint first sees daylight at the mouth of a concrete culvert adjacent to Delta World Headquarters in Hapeville. It then flows under four runways of the world’s busiest airport, the international terminal, and 16 lanes of traffic before emerging at the base of a retaining wall on the south side of Interstate 285. From that point the Flint runs freely for more than 200 miles, one of the longest undammed stretches of river in America, before merging with the Chattahoochee and flowing, finally, into the Gulf of Mexico.

The river has been on my mind for a few weeks, ever since I looked at a map of Georgia and realized that, even though I have lived in this state for 45 of my 55 years, I have never to my knowledge laid eyes, even once, on the Flint River. I could see it anytime, so I never did.

I exit the interstate and turn west, roll my window down, and breathe the morning air. The two-lane is all mine as I pass soybean farms and pulpwood plantations and Baptist churches with American flags out front, everthing aglow in the golden hour. I wonder, as I have so may times, what life might be like in a small town. I really have no idea.

The Rock City Limits. The sign pulls me out of my thoughts. What?

Later I learn that the Georgia General Assembly incorporated The Rock as a city in 1877 but its municipal charter was revoked in 1995. I don’t know why. But the sign remains, facing the rising sun, defiant. The name comes from a rock that was once used as a post office—the carrier would wedge letters into a hole in a rock formation that stood beside the wagon trail and leave it for locals to pick up. A portion of the original rock remains; the wagon trail has become GA 36; and a standard-issue post office now serves the hundred-odd citizens of 30285.

I leave The Rock behind and make my way to Sprewell Bluff Park. I round a high bend and the lovely Flint opens up before and below me, running wide and fast and shallow and clear. A great blue heron stands atop a rocky shoal, staring down its daggerlike bill at some poor doomed thing in the water. I park and turn off the engine and step out into the sound of the river. And what a sound! I am greeted by two kingbirds and a turkey vulture cruising low, waiting to ride the late morning thermals.

And then I see, out among the shoals, so small next to the heron, bobbing herself up and down to the rhythm of her own nature, a spotted sandpiper. The small, long-billed, long-legged, and ironically unspotted creature makes me smile. She is my first migrant of the season. She, along with many of her fellows, is following the river south ahead of the coming winter. She started somewhere in New England or eastern Canada and will make her way down the Flint to the warm shining Gulf of Mexico.

Perhaps she’ll stop there and spend her winter on this side of the Gulf, safe on the Florida coast. But maybe, if she feels bold and instinct insists, she’ll make the brave choice: cross the great water and wind up in Cuba or Belize or South America. This sounds incredible, that such a small creature would take such a long and chancy flight over hundreds of miles of open water, but very many birds do this exact thing twice every year.

The sandpiper, self-forgetful, present, following the Flint on a journey she did not choose and cannot understand, moves me. She works her way downriver, shoal to shoal, aware only of wind and water and crustaceans and crayfish, enfolded in beauty. Thus she will pass her days. But eventually she will arrive at land’s end and face the bright infinite water. What will she do then? Will she cling to solid ground or will she turn freely from what she knows and surrender herself to the long flight, destination unseen?

I wish I knew, I really do.