The dam

Editorial Assistant Amy Condren reflects on girlhood, fear, and the murky relationship between human and nature.

There are eels in the dam, slick and vicious. I know because I was warned, though I have never seen them. Years ago, my father built an A-frame swing high upon a steep bank above the family dam. The boys and the brave would cast themselves out on a line like live bait. Leaping forth, exhilarated, they would lurch upon the rope and plummet with a splash into the muddy void. The lily pads would shudder in their wake and I would watch. I was a child who took great heed of warnings.

I love to look at the surface of that dam. To consider that there is so much life underneath, lush and oblivious to me. To count the waterlilies in bloom and glimpse a ripple from the deep. To have my suspicions confirmed. 

When the lily pads grow unruly enough to choke out all the light beneath, I do not volunteer to clear them. Trepidation like this is a man-made wall — it stops the natural flow of things. Though I feel my bones like fault lines inside me, made up as they are of minerals, I still don't want to get into the water. Made up as I am of water, have I ever been of this earth? 

I’d rather sit cross legged on the jetty. At times, I think it’s because I am a girl. So many of my earliest lessons were of caution. Responsibility. Why linger, just to feel the slippery graze of something concealed, violent if provoked? As custodian of a vulnerable landscape, I smell storms in the air long before raindrops wet soil. But if the boys ever called me scared, I would wade into the dam waist deep with my insides coiling. Danger doesn’t mean the same thing to them. Boys are taught to push boundaries. They would push me in for fun. Given the choice, I never swim where water is murky. I leave things undisturbed. 

I have seen red-bellied black snakes slither on the banks of that dam, skulking over roots and fallen fronds. I once saw one saunter across the paddock, brazen and unfazed by the ride-on-mower like it knew that it was lethal. Mostly, I have seen them basking. 

I venture I am more made up of the sunrays that caress their scales than I am of something worldly. I say I am intangible. I say it to feel safe. If I am as impervious as the light kissing the leaves that swoosh and dapple shade upon the hides of beasts — if I am the light that licks them, nothing can harm me. I can burn from a distance. I cannot be bitten, nor must I bite back with my own teeth. It comforts me to be a match struck, blazing and ephemeral; it shames me to have paperbark for skin. And you want me to get in the water? To douse myself, willingly?

How did I come to see myself in all these delicate things? Calling it fear would be easy, but I swear a separation has been cleft in me. The feeling gnaws at me more like shame; to be so enamoured of life, yet so averse to diving in.

All I have ever known is a grievous consciousness of my own body. It ripples out from me like topographic lines — an awareness of my skin, reverberating like a sensor. It warns me to be wary of all that touches me. I know when my appendages are misplaced. Sensations always set my stomach plunging. It is never more abject than when I feel the squelch of sludge between my toes. Dams are pits of earthen sweat, meant for scaly and tenacious things. Nature knows I am an intruder, and the things I cannot see are threats to me. 

If I shoved a hook through my cheek, would it make sense to them? Or am I only more loveable in a compromising position? I have always known that there are eels, and that I am live bait. I have no proof beyond the dread reverberating in my bones. But that's not the kind of knowledge that gets you respect in the dam. Everyday I am cast out on a line, and it doesn’t thrill me.