#2: Pratt's Ferry Preserve

Pratt’s Ferry Preserve is a put-in spot. A place to launch kayaks and canoes. Maybe more accurate (if a bit less pleasant-sounding) to call it a take-out spot, though, as I’ve seen far more boaters disembarking here at this point between two bends of the Cahaba River. A waypoint. A place for comings and goings. I’ve never done much of anything here, though. For us — my wife and I — it has been a place to idle, to float, and, yes, to watch the occasional kayaker paddle into shore.

We’d started coming here in the summer of 2020 — the pandemic at a peak, the world suspended. Pratt’s Ferry Preserve sits under a bridge in West Blocton, a small town in Bibb County about halfway between Birmingham and Tuscaloosa, where we were living at the time. It’s a quiet spot; we’ll often have the place to ourselves. A good alternative to the wildlife refuge that’s not too far away — beautiful when the lilies are in bloom but often crowded and too shallow to get a proper swim in. We had a go-to swimming hole in Tuscaloosa but, times being what they are, the e-coli was in bloom and we were forced to look further out. This spot isn’t much to speak of — a gravel beach on one side, some trees under which to read, an embankment of rock on the other side, worn to a cross-section by river time. It became my custom to swim out across the river to the spot where the channel narrows and the current accelerates. I could fashion a sort of infinity pool, turning into the current and swimming upstream. I had to swim my little heart out just to stay in the same place. Moving furiously and not getting anywhere.

Shaelyn was seven months pregnant that summer and the weightlessness afforded by the water, the relief that came with it, was one of the few things to safely seek out and enjoy beyond our apartment door. How often have I looked from the riverbank out on Shaelyn wading in the water, her belly half-submerged, the current encircling her, framed by a simple beam bridge above, and wondering what to expect?

Expecting — that’s what they say about pregnancy. You’re expecting. A funny phrase, given the circumstances. Beyond the very immediate meaning of it — a child to be born — it was getting harder and harder to hazard any guesses about what would happen next. Or what wouldn’t happen next. On the day we’d planned to be married, the Times ran the names of the first one hundred thousand Americans to die from the coronavirus. We’d canceled the wedding, of course, and I’d been furloughed. Shaelyn’s job transfer hadn’t gone through. There was no foreseeable future. I’d look downriver but couldn’t see beyond the nearest bend.

It’s been two years since we first started coming to this spot on the Cahaba. Early this July, we went back. We took the backroads across central Alabama pastureland. The wet-towel humidity of a deep south summer day. The corridors of scorched pink mimosa and deep magenta crepe myrtle blooms flanking the county roads. The play of light and shadow across the tall clouds. 

You can’t step in the same river twice, we know that from Heraclitus. The river’s moved on, of course, and besides, you’ve changed, too. But Ozzie? Ozzie had never stepped in the river before. In any river. But today, framed by that same bridge, she’d stepped into the current, too.

Earlier that day, we’d buried Ozzie’s placenta under an elm tree. That’s a sentence I’d never expected to write. But so much for expectations. Maybe the idea burying Ozzie’s placenta sounds like a strange thing to do. It did a bit to me at first. Not so much anymore though. Ozzie’s placenta — I say that intentionally. Though it grew in Shaelyn’s womb, it carries 50% of Shaelyn’s genetic makeup, 50% of mine. Which is to say: It’s Ozzie’s. I learned that from Angela Garbes’s book