Lammas: Waters and Roads, Part II
The quest to become a hobbit-elf intensifies with a search for sacred waters
A key component of my quest: to touch the sacred waters of the Pemigewasset, the Jordan River of New Hampshire. It sounds like a simple enough task, yet it had been one that was out there lingering despite annual proximity to this river once a year for half a decade. My parents used to love the Old Man in the Mountain for some reason, so really it had been lurking around here off and on my whole life.
So why hadn’t I made it into the water? Was something stopping me? Whatever it was, I was determined to push through it. Whatever the hell else this year and this summer would be, it would be the year I had my transcendent Pemigewasset River experience.
It’s possible you’ve never heard this river, most commonly seen in the southern Whites, referred to as “the Jordan of New Hampshire”, and that’s because as far as I can tell I’m the only one who’s ever called it that. I like to do that sometimes, particularly in the absence of actual known sacred bodies of water. I’ve been known to make similar pronouncements about Lake Ontario, among other places. I mean, think about it — if we had a working system going on here, every geographic area, if not every state or even every locality, would have its own sacred body of water. Shouldn’t we all have access to holy H2O?
Don’t answer that. Even I’m not sure about this, because, all joking aside, what do I really mean by sacred or holy water? What does it do? Why would we need it?
Deep down, I believe we do need it, but I’m never entirely sure why. Most of the standard explanations rely on models I really don’t subscribe to — usually things like salvation or healing or cleansing. I don’t really believe we need to be saved, other than perhaps from ourselves, but I don’t know what that even means. Mortality is mortality, whether that’s of a person or a species or even a planet. What’s salvation? Immortality? That seems tempting but way too cheap. Whatever it is, anyway, a stream isn’t probably going to help with that. Even a holy stream. We still die.
Healing — oh come on, don’t get me started. I’m really deeply not on board with the current obsession with the trauma/healing dichotomy. I don’t think we’re all nearly as injured as we sometimes think we are, and from what I’ve seen, focusing on healing mainly results in more focusing on healing. If healing’s a never-ending process, take me off the goddamn list. That’s boring. I suppose that means it would be awesome if a river could sort of just take care of this all at once so we don’t have to think or talk about it anymore, but like, it doesn’t do that. I’m even a little glad because that also seems cheap.
Cleansing? Well, I mean water does literally clean us. Some waters are also extra clear and maybe have some good-ass minerals to sweeten the deal. That’s cool. But my views here are consistent with the rest — I don’t really think we’re dirty. We don’t need supernatural liquid to solve that nonexistent problem. We have showers.
Yet I’m still convinced we need sacred bodies of water.
Even in Echo Lake — the one in North Conway, not the one down by Cannon Mountain (and closer to the Pemi) — you can feel that it does something to you. There’s something about that cold turquoise-tinted puddle below those dramatic cliff ledges, that virgin water seemingly erupting from pure mountain rock earth. It’s something different. It does something to you.
It refreshes.
It lets you pause a little bit, perhaps even demands it. And that’s good, because I need that on this quest. I need to figure out how to chill the fuck out in life, to soften myself up, to quell the urge — carefully cultivated and exercised — to fight fight fight and win win win. Floating in the water and looking up at the big dramatic mountain clouds, I kept going back and forth on all of it. I mean, I do still want to win. But I know the pendulum has to shift too. I need to spend some time floating — just as I now floated in this cool pool — in gentleness, in lightheartedness, in kindness.
I need to know again — as I’ve known before, with my hippie self in charge — how much love itself can accomplish, and to not feel (as I do now) corny and embarrassed to say so.
Can sacred waters, perhaps this specific sacred river, help with that?
We did a trial run. The Saco was just up the road, and we had to pass it on the way back to the place we were staying. This river seemed as good as any for a trial run — hell, for all I knew, it may well have been half sacred itself. It has its origins in the northern Whites much as the Pemi originates in the southern part of the range, and it similarly travels a great distance, slicing right through the heart of Maine to dump out into the ocean near Old Orchard Beach. It’s a long river, and old river, a known river. Perhaps a good river. Yeah, almost certainly it must be sacred in some way.
We did it as a family, all five of us getting out of the car on the side of the semi-dangerous road, rushing across the street and over the guardrail on the other side as soon as it was safe. We weren’t totally sure the best way to scramble down the steep rocky slope to the waters or where to even leave our stuff. There was some degree of uncertainty, as well, with the fact that I would have to leave my phone and keys unattended on a rock with all these people around as we swam AWAY from these things in the river. But whatever. Sometimes you just gotta do it — vulnerability, in various ways, is often a part of these processes.
The kids had little trouble — aside from perhaps a small amount of trepidation — scrambling off of the rocky bank and into the cold water. And it WAS cold. This, much more so than pretty Echo, was VERY obviously virgin mountain-water. It was clearer than you can imagine and — seemingly — pristine and clean. I had to put out of my mind the fact that when I was six my dad and I had gotten a legendary stomach parasite from water while on a canoe trip along the Saco, and honestly it wasn’t that hard to do. Much as I hate and largely resent the “cleansing” metaphor, I had to admit, in the moment, I felt as though I were being cleansed by special water. Cold, perfect, carrying with it both energy and freedom.
Indeed, along its far banks, freedom could be seen. People sitting willy nilly, without paying admission, without any supervision, in beach chairs along the rocky shore, drinking their beers and cocktails freely, smiling, fishing, kicking back, one with this land and water that in this moment was owned by no person and yet possessed by all those present.
This was special. We had stumbled upon a world of the possible, a glimpse of what actually already exists in this world if we can just but stop at the right spot along the side of the road and slip through the right spot in the trees and discover what lies just BARELY hidden behind the ordinary and the mundane.
The quest was validated. I didn’t understand it any better, didn’t grasp — yet — quite where I had come from and where I would be going. But there, in the flow of this pretty cleansing consecrated stream, there I knew could be determined the truth to all of this.
The next steps of the journey would determine whether or not I would be able to truly see the truth or merely just know it to be there.