This creative nonfiction piece relates an incident that occurred at Quabbin Reservoir in central Massachusetts. Built in the 1930s by flooding four towns, Quabbin, which serves the Boston area, is one of the largest drinking-water reservoirs in the world. It covers 39 square miles and has 181 miles of shoreline. I grew up near it.

At the Bend

The path, once a road, came to a dead end at the water’s edge. Every time I visited this spot, I imagined horses and carriages traveling that road into the valley, to one of the four towns that were flooded to create the Quabbin reservoir in the 1930s. Fresh water for distant city folk. I peered beyond the surface in search of any tiny fish that might be darting around just off shore. Nothing. I looked up. The reservoir stretched for miles, as did its buffer of undeveloped forest. All around, quiet emptiness. No boats allowed, no hunting allowed, no dogs allowed.

The last time I’d been here, though, Gus was with me, bounding ahead with that unalloyed joy unique to dogs off their leashes. I could easily picture him now: a black four-legged form dutifully paused, tail excepted, maybe thirty yards ahead, tongue retracted for a moment as he turns his square, alert head back to me, a laggard at any pace. Are you coming?

He’d died more than a year ago. We put him down after surgery for a suspicious lump revealed hopeless numbers of tumors and left him emaciated and weak. Home from college, I’d slept on the couch so I could help him stand if he needed to go out, help him hoist the bony hips that were suddenly so heavy. In a few days he was back in the hospital. As my father phoned the vet for what would be the final conversation, I secretly listened from the top of the stairs, a baluster gripped in each hand. When he told the vet to go ahead, I laughed. A stifling hand flew to my mouth. Later, I cried.

If Gus were here, I thought, he’d be in the water, a Lab magnet even in this cold. Back in the woods, I’d noticed a breeze helping the dry leaves from the trees, and now, sweeping across this barren little point, it chilled me. I shoved my hands into my pockets, settled onto a large, smooth rock warmed by the sun, and closed my eyes to the shards of light coming off the ruffled water, the better to indulge in my melancholy reverie of drowned towns and dead dogs. Autumn is always tinged with melancholy in any case. Everything voluptuously withered, everything spent on summer’s surfeit. The leaves may blaze red and yellow, but the fire’s gone out.

I stood to head back. Smooth, silvered sticks, water-worn and perfect for fetching, seemed to be everywhere. I picked one up and threw it out over the reservoir. It spun, then splashed and disappeared. I had known it would not come back on its own, boomerang-like, but I had thought it would float. I turned away and walked into the trees.

I was still twenty minutes from the car when, coming around a bend in the trail up ahead, a figure appeared. Another solitary walker. Clearly a man. From a distance, I could see that he made his way in an eccentric style. It had something to do with the relation of his head to his body. He moved like a car that’s badly out of alignment, miraculously proceeding straight down the street while looking as if it’s about to careen onto the sidewalk and over a toddler in her stroller or some unlucky, unhip guy tethered to the last pay phone on earth.

“Hello,” I said as the man entered the appropriate “hello” range.

It was the kind of polite hello that simultaneously suggests an unspoken, and normally unnecessary, good-bye. Of course it was. I for one don’t set out alone down an isolated path on a brisk fall afternoon in hopes of striking up a conversation with a stranger. Especially not a strange man.

And he did seem strange. Off might be a better word. It was the instant and sweeping assessment a woman makes, at a glance, of a man under such circumstances. In addition to the misalignment, there was a slight dishevelment about him—the soles of the shoes worn down hard, pants uneven in length, the too-light jacket open to reveal that his shirt was missing a button at the apogee of his middle-aged gut. I can outrun him, I thought, not yet frightened but nevertheless outlining my options.

Ten yards into the woods on my right, parallel to the path, was one of those iconic New England stone walls that has outlived the hardscrabble farmer who built it by two hundred years and now shelters colonies of chipmunks. Easy enough to scramble over it and disappear into the trees—except this wall, at this particular point, was unfortunately adorned with a tangle of more recently outmoded wire fencing, barbed and rusty.

To my left, down a steep, rocky embankment, was the reservoir. As a child I believed that if only I could hold my breath long enough, I could dive to the bottom and swim along murky streets, past hardware stores, post offices, ice-cream parlors, and clapboard houses populated by fish and the occasional senior citizen who’d been too stubborn to move away and was still ensconced on the front porch, hands floating as if waving gingerly. In fact, the buildings had been moved or razed; there would be no church spire breaking the surface, breaching the boundary between the drowned world and my own, to which I could cling if the frigid water overcame me as I swam to safety.

If I hadn’t lingered in the sun, I would have been closer to the car. Which was well beyond the stranger. If only Gus were here.

Apparently, the man now within reach of me had not interpreted my “hello” as the “hello/good-bye” type, had perhaps chosen not to. He did not reciprocate and pass by in a well-socialized pretense of preoccupation with his innermost thoughts or with scanning the ground for salamanders and pinecones. Instead, he sought out my eyes and stopped just enough in front of me that I was all but forced to stop too.

"Wanna see somethin’?" he asked.

No, I thought, I do not want to see somethin’, and the hammer that was poised to come down on the red alarm bell in my head, the bell that would tell me to stud my fist with the points of the keys in my pocket, began its slow-motion journey.

Before I could answer, before the hammer could strike its message, he pulled from his jacket the biggest nail I’d ever seen, raised it to his chest, grasping either end with thick fingers, and bent it in half.

He handed it to me, grinning. It was hot at the bend.

“Thanks” I said, otherwise speechless.

“You can have that,” he said, his hands disappearing back into his pockets and the grin, spiked with stubble, widening to reveal a dingy set of teeth.

“Thanks,” I said again.

Then came a pause that should have been awkward, leaden, but was not. Liberated from all norms and expectations, the moment floated easily, like the leaves drifting down around us. There was, too, the mediating presence of the nail suspended between us in my still outstretched hand for our mutual admiration. The nail—a relic of Brobdingnag?—made my hand look a child’s. Finally I raised my eyes to his, noticing on the way that his shirt was missing not one but two buttons. I smiled uncertainly. Then we continued our separate ways, swishing in duet through the accumulation of fallen leaves, breathing their sweet decay, me toward the stuffy interior of my car, and him, crookedly, toward the point. I didn’t look back. What if he wasn’t there?

By the time I reached my car, gravity had reasserted itself. The space between me and the man had grown out of proportion to the actual distance. I looked at my hand, and it was my own, the hand of an adult. Yet heavy and hard in my pocket was a nail. Or what looked like a nail—it would never serve its intended purpose, after all, but had served some other, inscrutable one. I pulled it out and held it so it made a V. The metal was cold now. I pressed my thumb to the point. It hurt, and I laughed.

When the man reached the water’s edge, he kept right on walking, for all I know. He stepped into the broken light, all the sharper for the sinking of the sun, in his worn and tilting shoes. His belly dropped beneath the surface like a weight. The water closed over his head. And he descended the winding road into the gentle dimness of the valley, waved back at the senior citizens on their porches, their dogs too, strolled past the hardware store, the post office. When he came to the ice cream parlor, he stopped. He went in and settled down on a stool, the kind that spins if you want, and ordered his usual, a strawberry cone.

Copyright Laura MacKay

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