Quarry

by James O. — Water and remembering.

by James O.

The dust from the car ahead floats languidly in the air, awaiting some other particle from some other passing car to displace it and put it gently to rest. A quick veer off the highway onto some dirt road and the dirt parking lot is mostly full, in the kind of way that makes your stomach churn uneasily. Especially when it’s summer. Gently, we turn in and some kind of makeshift gate keeper emerges from a plastic tent one could barely call a shelter. His white plastic chair looks like it is melting, either from the weight of its occupant or the summer heat. Undetermined. 

The classical music from the radio, once loud and verdant in contrast to the mundanity of a country road, is muted as my father turns the knob down and simultaneously lowers his window to pay his fee to the masked and rubber gloved man. 

“Ten dollars for two adults.”

 “Christ, it's gone up. I remember when it used to be a quarter per person.” We fiddle for a moment in the cup holder trying to find the bills we had pre-arranged for this very purpose. The bill is then placed in the man’s bucket, wherefore he nods solemnly and gestures onward and places himself back in his melted throne. Perhaps Charon, guardian of the rivers of the underworld, does the same. Undetermined. 

America’s oldest marble quarry. 1789. Abandoned in the 70s like most everything else around here. Filled in with water and bought by Harold and Zelda, a local couple who bought everything in the surrounding area in a booze-fueled buy-out. Today, whenever that may be, it’s nothing but a quarry of memories, from decades ago or yesterday. Innocence lost to the murky green waters. First kisses. First goodbyes. Who knows how many of America’s youth have dove head first into these waters only to find that the world they emerge to is not the one they left?  

Long ago my father had been one of those youths, or at least he said he had been. I sat in the passenger seat, maybe the same age he was when he had swam in these artificial and uncanny waters. Windows rolled down, air humid and hot brushes past my face. The hot gaze of the sun falls through the spaces in between leaves and shines on the freckled and wrinkled hands of my father, turning the wheel of the car into our parking spot.

We step out from the car onto the carpet of pine needles that covers the gravel, and walk towards the recreational pit of dark water and carved rock. Little boys, small bodies and large shorts, leap with their legs askew from the edge of the quarry, falling like feathers in summer sun. Their silhouettes make disproportionate splashes in the surface, and they rise from the cold inky waters with their hair covering their eyes. 

Their parents, overweight and sunburnt, lay strewn about on towels too small for their stretching bodies. Sunglasses perched lazily on red noses and bathing suits rest on splayed limbs. One couple sit with their legs dangling on the edge, brushing their heels against the cut stone as they kick out into the open air. Their wrinkled hands are woven together in a tapestry of touch, anchoring both of their bodies to the warm rock beneath them.

Had they too swam in this same quarry as a child, supervised by the love of another? Returning again, to push forward generations of remembering.

My father and I walk the ledge of the quarry, walking behind the small groups of children and the parents positioning themselves to leap into the water, walking in the footsteps of their descendants. 

“Looks higher than I remembered,” my father says. He stands at the ledge with his hands on his hips, his skin marked by frequent touches of the sun. Small body, large shorts. He takes off his glasses and shirt, and places them both in a small pile next to his feet. He turns to me and smiles, that same toothy smile I seem to have intergenerationally stolen and made my own. It is the same smile that I have to ask for when taking his photograph. The smile that makes his brown eyes shine, with the creases in the corner of his eyes as their frame. It is in this smile, that I know myself, and through that knowing, see my father as a part of me. It is an understanding that moves forwards and backwards through time. 

“Here I go.” With a slight crouch, my father leaps from the heights of the chiseled walls of the quarry and dives into the black waters of unknowable depth. I watch as his body disappears into the water, like running water passing into a reservoir. 

I put my hands above my head and with a push of my feet, let my body fall through the air like an arrow of fate. It dissolves, and like running water I flow into the depths of remembering.