I grew up in a wilderness commune on Vancouver Island, so there was never any escaping bodies of water.
The Pacific on all sides, rivers, lakes, glaciers. And beyond that, salmon spawning grounds, early frosts, and icicles that hung from our eaves. Our backhoe and hand-dug well. Rain two hundred days a year. Lichen and moss over every outdoor surface, lawn, rock, tree and house—mycelium networks the size of cities moiling through the wet earth.
The summer I was ten years old, I watched a family friend pull an Olympia oyster off the rocks at Cowichan Bay, shuck it with a Swiss Army knife, and tip the mucus-like creature down his throat. I was revolted and impressed. Two years later my little brother and I were baptized in that same man’s outdoor hot tub, since our church met in a rented community hall without the in-built baptism tanks other evangelical institutions boasted. Our whole congregation stood in the backyard, the water lukewarm, chlorine stinging our nostrils. I refused to close my eyes, and still recall the wavering, blurred face of our pastor from beneath the surface, the moment of pause that caused my heart to twist and flash in fear, and then the incongruously militant hymns while I dried off with a giant florescent blue Sex Wax beach towel, then stood dripping in my bathing shorts while my brother was also reborn.
A decade later that same pastor, a guest at my wedding, took my arm during the ocean-front reception and told me he’d just been to visit our mutual acquaintance in prison. He was a young man, the son of the oyster shucker and hot tub baptism tank owner, who had, in a rage over money and stolen narcotics, cracked open the head of one of our former schoolmates with a claw hammer. I remember each of them as they were before that moment: the boy who wielded the hammer, whose mother bought him bright red girl’s jeans that he wore to church and complained to us that the zipper was in the wrong place and we all laughed though we weren’t sure why yet; and the boy whose head he opened up, who I traded hockey cards with, and who had seemed so hyperactive on the school playground I still can’t imagine his body and limbs ever being still.
When I sat down to write this, I planned to frame a series of vignettes, eco-happy memories of growing up in a temperate rainforest. To talk about cedars in a downpour, and how it’s possible to sit beneath their dense drooping branches without feeling so much as a drop, or about learning to swim at three years of age in Shawnigan Lake, where the teacher held my head underwater to ‘cure’ me of my discomfort and fear, of how this tiny trauma inspired me to become a lifeguard and swimming instructor, or, if pressed for something resembling a narrative, about my partner and I caught in a typhoon off the east coast of Borneo, our tiny diesel boat chugging through swells that dwarfed us, terrified us, until two mating sea turtles rose from the frothing turquoise to quiet our panic. I could have written about children daring one another to sneak up and pluck my chest hair in Korean bath houses, their fathers’ chests bare like their own, or listening to the women divers of Jeju island whistling to expel the stale air from their lungs, as they surfaced with sacks of abalone and sea urchin. But, in honesty, I can’t stop thinking about my classmate, his skull opened in a brutal round hole, fluids leaking from it as from a cracked shell.
I drove past the hot tub house a few years ago, still there, though I think the family I knew had long since moved on. I wanted to explore the backyard, see the hot tub again, but I wasn’t quite sure how to explain it all if someone was home. Explain that I’d never visited him, never even truly considered it, that I don’t know why, that I still wonder what the drinking water tastes like in prison, if the showers are warm or cool, if he dreams of his father on the shore of Cowichan Bay with his knife and collection of dripping white oysters.
Matthew Hooton is the author of the novels Deloume Road and Typhoon Kingdom, and has written fiction and non-fiction for dozens of venues internationally. He teaches at the University of Adelaide, where he is a member of the JM Coetzee Centre for Creative Practice, and where his research ranges from Korean history through Jim Henson’s Muppets and the stunts of Evel Knievel. Bodies is featured in Jacaranda 10.2, which is available for sale now.