Overexposure

There’s a car at the bottom of the river.

Locals love to say that to visitors taking in the burgeoning tourism industry in the city. There never used to be a car at the bottom of the river, just like how the city never used to have a burgeoning tourism industry, and it’s arguable if it has one at all. If it does, it only really happens in the summer. Most things only ever happen in the summer, which isn’t all the way true, but is in some ways. Take this one summer for instance, when the bottom of the river wasn’t the bottom of a river, but a road. Or so the story goes in Tall Tales of the River Valley, a very Saskatoon-specific zine some guy made in a basement suite off 8th Street.

The only fish left in the valley was a Lake Sturgeon named Baurice, because Baurice was loyal as fuck to the waters that raised him.

In it, there’s a comic about that bottom-of-the-river road, and it stories how the river dried up for a summer and people who fished the river swarmed the valley to retrieve fish for food or to hold a fish and pose with it for a photo, or to pose with it for a photo and eat it shortly after. But there were nearly no fish because the fish already knew the dry up was coming and they fled to a big lake in the east, that one with the muddy water. The only fish left in the valley was a Lake Sturgeon named Baurice, because Baurice was loyal as fuck to the waters that raised him. But no one ever saw Baurice. Baurice hid inside of a cave on the riverbank where, after the dry up, there remained a small reservoir of water and a slow drip from the ceiling that was just enough to keep him breathing. He’d been living in that cave and others like it for decades—they helped maintain his status as a mythical creature—but he considered this particular cave home. It was situated at a point right where the river bottom meets the bank, meaning a part of the cave was on the bank and the other part was on the bottom of the river. Fluctuating water levels meant that sometimes the part of the cave on the bank was above water, but this was the first time the entire cave was completely exposed.

One morning, just before dawn, a fog rolled in so thick that you couldn’t see from one side of the river to the other. Baurice was hungry. Baurice knew that if he left his cave he could hide behind the veil of the fog, and that the moisture from the fog would nourish him while he scoured the river-road for clams and larvae and fish eggs.

While Baurice scoured the river-road for food, somebody drove onto the river-road by way of the Broadway boat launch on the west bank of the valley. The driver knew they could hide behind the veil of the fog and drive as recklessly as they wanted, so they pinned down the gas pedal and did a few donuts before straightening out and driving under the Broadway Bridge, the University Bridge, and were en route to the CPR bridge at a speed of one-hundred-and-forty kilometres per hour.

Baurice was a giant sturgeon. He followed his giant barbels to locate clam after clam, and sucked down every clam he found clean into his stomach. The clams were scattered across the river-road, mixed in with some larvae and maybe a fish egg or two, Baurice wasn’t sure, and he didn’t care. He just followed them like a trail on Easter morning, and from the tip of his tail to his nose, his body took up a considerable portion of the river-road, which he found himself in the middle of. The clam trail led Baurice face first in the direction of the University Bridge. The driver couldn’t see Baurice through the fog, and Baurice was too preoccupied with sucking clams into his stomach to react to the fact that the car was headed straight for him. As Baurice went to slurp up another clam, Baurice sucked the car into his mouth and clean into his stomach.

Baurice was in trouble now. He had a muscular stomach that had experience breaking down artificial material and garbage that he’d accidentally eaten, even parts of vehicles like tires, nuts, and license plates. But his stomach never had to digest an entire vehicle at once. Baurice thought this might be the thing that kills him, but oddly enough, he felt fine. Full. And so, he crawled back to his cave. For a while he heard the driver screaming but by the fifth day, the on-and-off screams from the driver stopped altogether. Baurice felt sorry for the driver but grateful that they sacrificed themself to satisfy his hunger. It made surviving the dry-up easy. He waited out the rest of the summer in his cave, which was only a few weeks, and he never had to leave. Being perpetually full was a bit boring, but it was peaceful.

The onset of winter preceded Halloween. Through a snowfall, Baurice watched groups of children walk a stretch of the river road dressed up as zombies and vampires, cats and dinosaurs, witches and wizards. They were carrying pillowcases full of candy. Baurice had grown content with the thought of death, and even though the slow drip stopped dripping, his warm body was enough to keep the reservoir from freezing.

All winter, he focused on each breath, the water flowing into his mouth, passing over his gills, and exiting through the flap in his giant head. Over and over and over, until finally: spring. With spring, melting ice from the glaciers out west. A drop became a stream became a river returned, the river that always drained into a lake that another river carried into the muddy water, to the Bay, all the way out to the sea. Most of the fish who went there seeking refuge before the dry up returned from that eastern lake and went back into the swift flowing river that raised not only Baurice but them too. And when they did, they saw Baurice at the bottom of the river, which wasn’t unusual, but what was unusual was his demeanour, how he wasn’t swimming lazily or sleeping or grazing for food—his abdominal was contracting and he was heaving and heaving. He heaved and heaved until finally he retched the vehicle out of his stomach and into the water, where it floated for a second before landing gently on all four tires at the bottom of the river. All the other fish jolted away and back again, watching Baurice circle the vehicle three times, rubbing his barbels on it one last time, and then departing this river for the first time. He swam for many days until he too reached the muddy water and swam through it to the Bay, where the saline levels increased and increased. Baurice swam through and crossed a kind of estuary into the Atlantic Ocean where he tasted saltwater, truly, in what he figured to be its purest form, and he had to admit he liked it. Baurice didn’t think about anything but each breath and the way that saltwater flowed into his mouth, passed over his gills, and exited through the flap in his giant head. Over and over and over, until finally: there was no more thinking, no more breath. Just spring. Another car at the bottom of another river. Another freshwater fish gone dead in the sea.

It didn’t happen that way, but it’s a fun story, and little kids and the little-kid-in-everybody loves to hear it.

The comic had some unintended effects that subtly warped the city’s history, their unwillingness to act upon the calamity that was the car at the bottom of the river, because the city missed the point. Saskatoon was a city that ought to do something about it, but won’t because projects like that cost money, and white taxpayers don’t want their money wasted on confirming whether or not there’s a lifeless brown body in a car at the bottom of the river. That was the phrasing that stuck. Wasted. That word stuck as an adjective too. Wasted. They would rather the wasted natives shut up about it. They would rather just talk about it as a tall tale, would rather maintain the story’s function as a way to captivate interest on a first date or to a row of people sitting next to at a bar. Have you heard the story about the car at the bottom of the river? they would ask, and whether they’d heard about it or not, whatever conceptions they had or didn’t have about that car and how it got there would soon be eclipsed by the story of Baurice The Loveable Lake Sturgeon & The Summer The River Went Dry.

On summer days, white freeloaders and taxpayers alike will lay with their heads on the warm sand just a stone’s throw away from the brown body in the car at the bottom of the river.

They will drink locally brewed beer and listen to indie music, maybe pass a football or pepper a volleyball back and forth. They might skip a rock a few feet on either side of where the car is and when the rock stops skipping and starts its descent to the left or right of the hood of the car, they might celebrate their new record and exhale, proceeding to comment on what a nice summer day it is, even though it is early October and the canopies dancing in the valley are a mosaic of burnt orange and yellow, losing their colour leaf by leaf. With every gust of wind, the trees wither into a skeleton of the summer that was.

Except, unlike Muskrat, the kid will emerge empty-handed. And even if he wasn’t, he had one part of the story all wrong: nobody would have been there to receive that bit of earth. Nobody would have been there to dance.

On that same not-summer night, a visibly white kid will dare himself to animate the creation story his teacher read him from a book of Native Legends printed in 1989. That kid will accept his own dare and try to make like Muskrat and dive to the bottom of the river. He will try to bring back some brown piece of earth—a limb or even a follicle from the body of the brown kid stuck in the car at the bottom of the river—and spread it across the middle-class, suburban neighbourhood he’s growing up in. To spread it across that neighbourhood, he might try dancing, just like they do in the creation story, but he won’t have a chance to build up the courage to do that, because what courage he had will have been channelled into diving to the bottom of the river to try and get that urban legend out of the car. A current in the river would drown him in its undertow, which was perfect, because the story was unfolding almost exactly as it should have. Except, unlike Muskrat, the kid will emerge empty-handed. And even if he wasn’t, he had one part of the story all wrong: nobody would have been there to receive that bit of earth. Nobody would have been there to dance.

After he dies in approximately the same area as where the lifeless brown body in the car is, the mother of the boy who wanted to be Muskrat will learn about how the mother of the boy in the car in the river dealt with her grief about raising a boy who was destined to become an urban legend at the bottom of the river. To become the crux of a fight between local and provincial governments to search the river, to pull his body out of the vehicle, but to have that case closed without any closure at all. Wanna-be Muskrat’s mother will learn about how car-in-the-river mother drapes a yellow cloth in the window, and how that yellow cloth absorbs all of her worries and guilt and shame, from full moon to full moon to full moon. Every twenty-eight days, she’ll take down the cloth and sprinkle tobacco in its centre, tie it, and bring it to a ceremonial site on the banks of kisiskâciwanisîpiy, the swift flowing river that cuts through the city, which is to say it cuts through the land, where she meets with other women in community who do the same thing. She would learn about how all of those women will give their tobacco ties up to a fire and watch their sorrow dissipate against the mid-to-late evening blue-orange to purple-black sky and glimpse the city lights, depending on the weather and where one stood in the circle. But all Wanna-be Muskrat’s mother had was a story. The way she’d let go would be different from how the mother of an urban native turned urban legend would let go, and she didn’t want to mess with whatever it was that was holding that story together, didn’t want to become wrapped up in their grief any more than she already had been.

Wanna-be’s mother’s gift was closure in the form of her son’s body washed up on the shoreline. When his funeral ended, she carried her funeral attire, a black dress, into her backyard and laid it at the bottom of her firepit, dousing it in what gasoline was left in the jerry can that should’ve been locked in the shed but wasn’t. That should’ve had a scepter spout but didn’t. She just tipped the capless can over and breathed in the fumes, an aroma that reminded her of the shoes her son wore to work as a gas jockey, a guilty pleasure not unlike the cigarette she just lit, except now that cigarette wasn’t for pleasure but a salve, and there was no guilt but necessity. She took two long drags, one for her and one for her son, before throwing the cigarette into the firepit and lighting the dress on fire.

She cried for some time, her tears waxing and waning with the fire. When it was almost out, she walked inside to a photo of her son that she’d meant to hang for months. She held the photo in her hand, and she almost wanted to give it up to the embers, but instead she framed it and hung it next to the window that overlooked the firepit, thinking what now, what now. She decided against trying to raise money to install a sign near the water’s edge to keep people away from this lethal part of the river, deciding against what, for her, would have been little more than a dilated note to self. But a sign is what she needed, so she called a real estate agent to put one in her lawn. Two months later, she looked for another of the same kind and set out to begin again in a small town overseas, where she’d set afloat the newly framed photo of her son and a letter addressed to him, clinging steadfast to the belief that he’d be there on the other side of that turquoise expanse and all its majesty, trusting that the frame will wash up on some celestial shoreline, and he’d be there to receive it.

The frame would wash up on a shoreline, but Wanna-be Muskrat wouldn’t be there to receive it. It would be some rural kids who will look at his orange hair and his haircut and laugh, who will say in their language that he’s ugly as sin, they’ll poke their fingers on his chubby face and say look at this stupid American, he must be American, the fucking cow. Lay off the soda pop and donuts and move something other than your thumbs, they’ll say. One of them will pull the baseball bat from their backpack and the other will toss the frame up and they’ll get a real kick out of the way the bat shatters the frame. The frame will be in pieces, and they’ll discover the letter, and they’ll unfold it, but they can’t read English so they’ll just tear the letter in half and toss it behind them as they walk away, never thinking about Wanna-be or those who might’ve loved him ever again.

As the kids walk away, Wanna-be’s mother will be shopping along the ocean-front strip in the village she’s now called home for months, and she’ll think she just heard something. Thunder, maybe. But it’s a week before the start of monsoon season, and the mid-afternoon sky is cloud-free, the tropical sunlight piercing through the palm leaves and sprinkling onto the street and the sidewalk. The 33 degree Celsius heat beats down on the intersection and reaches its way up the concrete hill, like cloth being stretched across a window.

Tomorrow, the morning song of a summer bird and her pale blue eggs hatching open. Tomorrow, the colour yellow and a subsong

Some twelve-thousand kilometres away, there’s a yellow cloth hanging in a window, and it’s aroma is fresh with sacred smoke. Cedar, sage, sweetgrass, tobacco. A twinge of aurora borealis dances against the blue hour of a prairie morning, and the mother of the other boy who died in the river is sound asleep. She’s dreaming of fire. Not just fire, but a fire baton spinning in the air, spinning and falling towards her until it’s caught by a hand, an elegant hand that twirls it around long fingers and throws it back into a pure-white sky. She waits for it to come back down, but it doesn’t—the baton just swirls and swirls, and grows smaller and smaller until the flames on either end look like stars falling. The baton swirls in a perfect circle, as if rotating around some fixed point on a needle, before vanishing into a pitch white cosmos where there is no moon.

When she wakes, her breath is heavy. She catches it and works to slow her breathing. She exhales, opening her blinds to a deep blue cosmos where there is no moon but a blanket of green dancing in the sky. For a second, scattered violet and a glimpse of her grandmother’s face. Tomorrow, an imperceivable ever-presence and a thin sliver of moonrock ten degrees above a cottonwood tree. Tomorrow, the morning song of a summer bird and her pale blue eggs hatching open. Tomorrow, the colour yellow and a subsong. Every year, a primal thirst. A story and the flowing river.

Always the flowing river.