by David G Daniel (December 2025)
My father shoved our canoe into the Saranac River on a cloudless, hot, July afternoon in the Adirondack Mountains. The river was constantly changing. We paddled hard in deep, slow-moving water, turned a bend and suddenly found ourselves in white water dodging boulders. Below the rapids the canoe slid over rocks with a nerve-rattling grating sound and ground to a halt. Dad climbed out of the canoe cautiously, shuffled gingerly over the slippery riverbed and dragged us into deeper water.
We passed around juice boxes, cheese crackers and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches Mommy had made for us. There was a breeze, but between the tight-fitting life preservers and the afternoon July sun, it felt very hot. To keep us cool Dad splashed us with the cold river water. My younger brother Noah and I pleaded with my father to let us swim. Finally, we found a shallow place where the current wasn’t so fast as to sweep us away.
“Let me lift you out,” Dad instructed, “so we don’t capsize the canoe. And stay upstream of the boat, OK?” The surface bubbled and frothed and glistened in the sunlight. Smallmouth bass jumped nearby. Noah and I giggled and played and picked up shells.
Suddenly the canoe shifted in the current on the rocky shelf and my father just managed to grab the bow rope. His right foot slid into a deep hole. He pivoted back and fell to his left knee, steadying himself. He wedged his water shoe against a rock and sprang back to his feet.
We watched wide-eyed, mouths agape. I grabbed Noah’s hand and held it tightly.
“Daddy, you’re all wet. Are you OK?”
My father’s voice quavered then steadied. “Everything is fine. The surface is slick. I just slipped for a moment.” Then he lifted Noah and I back into the canoe and we paddled through deeper, clear water where we could see the bottom and weeds and an occasional trout dart by. Dad pointed out red-yellow-and-blue-shelled turtles sunning themselves on rocks.
“Be very quiet and we can drift up to them. Pull your paddles in.”
We drifted soundlessly on the momentum of the boat to a calmer area near shore.
“Look,” Dad whispered.
“They’re so big!” Noah exclaimed.
“How many do you see, Noah?”
“One, two, three, four, five…”
I chimed in, “Six, seven, eight.”
The turtles noticed them now and two of the larger ones craned their necks, looking at them. Then they plopped into the water in quick succession.
“Do you think they’re snapping turtles?” I asked with obvious trepidation.
Noah began to look frightened. “Don’t get too close to the turtles, Daddy.”
“They look like painted turtles to me,” my father said, sorry he had worried Noah. “They aren’t likely to bite you.”
“Look,” my father said, suddenly pointing to the southwest. “I think it’s an eagle.”
As the huge bird circled overhead, Dad said, “See that white head? It looks bald. That’s a bald eagle.”
The eagle flew lower and circled again for a few minutes before the river current carried them around a bend and the eagle was out of sight.
“Look, boys” my father continued. “See those birds on the water?”
Ahead was a mat of large birds with black-and-white heads floating in the water close to one another. “Do you know what they are?”
I guessed, “Geese.”
“What kind of geese?”
When they drifted close enough to see their black-and-white heads, I responded triumphantly, “Canada geese!”
Very pleased, my father responded, “That’s right, David.” As we got within around 75 yards of the raft-looking floating flock, a hoarse, honking cry broke out from the closest sentry. It was quickly picked up by the flock into a cacophony as they rose almost as one and flew in a low, careening pattern to the northwest before rising briefly and then descending several river bends to the north.
Noah had a precocious sense of direction and seemed to know we were back just before we turned the bend in the river and saw the white placard with “13” marked on it nailed high in a tree. We let the current glide us into the inlet where we had left the car. My father got out in knee-deep, muddy water, dragged the canoe to the concrete launch and pulled it up until we could exit without getting wet. Then he turned the boat over to drain it, dragged it up the ramp and lifted it on top of our car. As he strapped the canoe in place he watched nervously while Noah and I frolicked in knee-high water at the end of the launch, collecting shells. “Be careful not to step into the current,” he said, and made us get out.
***
Dad parked the car on the long, overgrown, rutted road that led to our rental cabin. I raced inside first. “Shane, are you OK?” I asked the family dog. Shane wagged the stump of his tale and smiled obeisantly. I refilled his water bowl and sneaked him a slice of turkey from the refrigerator.
Mommy pretended not to notice Shane eating the turkey. “Nap time and then dinner,” she shouted, shooing Noah and I into our bunk beds. Then Mommy said, “Bevy, and I are going to drive into town and bring back pizza.”
“Yay!” my twin brothers Noah and Teddy shouted almost in unison. “No mushrooms for me, please,” I added.
After my mother and my sister, Bevy, left Noah and Teddy quickly fell asleep and my father climbed up into my bunk to tuck me in.
“This is how your grandmother, Nana Beverly put me to bed when I was your age,” he said, giving me loving pats and tucks. “Then she would say, ‘Gay schlafen,’ and kiss us goodnight.”
“What does that word mean, Daddy?”
“It’s from a language her people spoke in the old country. It means, ‘go to sleep’. She died before she could meet you, but you kids would have been the light of her life.” Then, tired from the heat and canoeing, I drifted off to sleep.
I woke up to the sound of my mother honking the car horn to announce her return. I must have looked startled because my father looked very concerned. “David, are you OK?”
“I had a dream about Nana Beverly. She spoke from the other side of a gate. She was trying to tell me something about the Angel of Death, but the car horn woke me up.”
“Angel of Death?” my father asked, his eyes widening. “David, that is very strange.”
I paused for a moment. “That’s what she said, I’m sure.”
My father’s expression tensed. “Why would you dream about such a thing?” A moment later his countenance relaxed and he smiled. “I know where you heard it. It must have been at the nursing home when we visited great Aunt Sarah. She likes to talk about the old legends she grew up with. The superstition is that you should not name your children after the living because the Angel of Death might take the child instead of the parent by mistake. You and I have the same name. Great Aunt Sarah doesn’t actually believe in the Angel of Death or that it could take the wrong person. She was just trying to give us the feel for the old country. That’s why you dreamed it. It’s just nonsense. She didn’t mean to scare you. Let’s go eat our pizza!”
After dinner, the twins and Bevy and I explored the sheds behind the cabin. In one shed was an all-terrain vehicle (ATV). It looked much larger, heavier and more powerful than the kind we had seen people ride for fun. Noah and Teddy climbed onto the seat. Bevy was mortally afraid of it and wouldn’t get near it.
I ran to get my father. “Dad, there’s an ATV, can we go for a ride?” It was a big one and surrounded by trailers that could be attached to a ball socket on its rear to cut heavy field grass, plow or haul materials. The rental company had left the key in the ignition.
“Stand back, I’ll take it for a test run and check it out,” my father said. He climbed aboard the ATV and was about to turn the key when his cell phone rang. The cellular reception was terrible near the cabin and the voice on the other end was garbled and incomprehensible. Dad climbed off the ATV and set out with the phone walking up the slope behind the cabin to try to get better reception. Bevy ran to catch up with Daddy. “Can I go with you?” she pleaded. Dad took her hand and they walked up the hill together. An unexpectedly cool breeze, the kind that usually blew just as the sun dropped over the horizon, shook the branches of the cedars outside the shed. In the late-afternoon sunshine, the wind cast a melody of fluttering shadows. The remaining light of the day seemed to be in a tug-of-war between the sunlit, green river meadows teeming with life below us and the dense forest on the mountainside above.
***
Mommy inspected the ATV, climbed aboard and turned the key. The engine roared to life and it seemed to work fine. We walked through the woods and fields in the clear late-summer twilight, with Mommy lighting the way with the bright halogen headlight of the ATV. Shane trotted along behind us, dashing off occasionally to chase whatever creature crossed our path. We meandered, laughing and singing Down by the Bay, silly and dizzyingly high from sweet chocolate ice cream we ate from cones Mommy had pulled out of a small cooler bag. We could just make out the glow of fireflies in the treetops as we came out of the woods into the fields.
“Look at that moon!” Mommy exclaimed. “That’s the second full moon this month. That’s pretty rare. It’s called a blue moon when that happens.” She began to croon, “Bluuuue moon, I saw you standing alone…”
When we got to the river, we played with our Frisbee and then hide-and-seek in the tall grass of the meadow. The riverbank was a wooded cliff dropping steeply to a rocky bottom. The rental company had warned us not to bring anything heavy too close because the bank sometimes collapsed. Shane sniffed around the animal slides and burrows in the mud, climbing up and down the nearly vertical face, which was held together by tough low shrubs. A fallen oak tree lay just offshore. Shadowy cigar-shaped fish with flat heads lolled in the shallow water around the branches, looking huge.
“Look.” Mommy pointed. “I think those are catfish or gar.”
“Can we eat them?” Teddy asked.
“Some people eat the catfish. I think the gar are too bony.”
A hundred yards or so upriver, a backhoe had cut a more gradual ramp down to the water. It was overgrown but made a gentle descent to the gravelly shore. We took off our shoes and stepped into the cold water. A few feet from shore, the current was strong enough to sweep us away. We threw big reddish rocks out into the current.
“Boys! Stop that. The more stones you take out of the side of the bank, the weaker it gets. Come here. I’ll show you how to skip rocks. I’m a rock-skipping champion, you know.”
Mommy gathered some small flat rocks and handed a few to each boy. “You’ve got to keep your arm parallel to the ground, like this.”
I imitated her movement, while Teddy and Noah contorted their arms in odd motions.
“Teddy. Noah. Watch,” Mommy said. She flicked a stone across the river and we watched it bounce, counting each hop. We each got to throw until we got several bounces.
Along the bank, there were roots and dead tree trunks that looked people-like and spooky in the dimming light. Mommy identified some of the plants as mandrakes. There were remnants of a campfire in the meadow near the bank. Someone had piled up stones there.
“You know,” Mommy said, “these rocks may have been put here on purpose. I think it’s a cairn. It’s part of someone’s religion.”
We looked at her quizzically but were distracted as we passed a nearly 4-foot black snake in a tree on the riverbank. We stopped to look. It looked back at us too. It wasn’t afraid but it didn’t attack. We passed a very large hole in the ground with big pile of brown dirt in front of it.
“Hey, that’s a badger’s den, I think. Remember when we saw that badger earlier?” Mommy asked.
“Yeah,” Teddy chimed in. “Daddy thought it might get Shane.”
We came across another gentle ramp dug through the bank that provided easy access to the river. Nearby, the honey locust trees were covered with thorns big enough for us to hang our towels on. “Honey locust trees are not native to here,” Mommy said.
On a path freshly trampled down through the weeds leading away from the campfire site, we came across the remains of an otter with a spine and no skin. It had been cut in two across the middle. You could see both halves. The bottom part looked like it was half-alive because it had been left standing on its hind legs.
“Yuck,” Noah grimaced.
“What did that, Mommy?” I asked.
“I don’t know. It could have been an animal, I suppose. I don’t know why a person would cut an animal in half like that and leave it. It’s kind of creepy.”
On the edge of the green meadow where it abutted the woods, a decaying wooden deer stand sagged under the branches of a huge oak tree, with its corrugated metal roof on the forest floor 12 feet below. As we approached, a small flock of wild turkeys, mostly hens and poults, melted into the forest. From the deer stand, a hunter could watch broad expanses of meadow and deer paths leading from the hilly national forest to the river.
Tired from the afternoon canoe trip I climbed aboard the ATV with Mommy. As we turned the ATV toward the cabin, a gray rabbit with a white tail froze in front of us, staring into the headlights. We stopped, the rabbit tensed. Mommy waited, but the rabbit didn’t move.
“David, get off for a minute so I can turn around. We don’t want to bother that bunny.” Mommy laughed. “Boys, stay there.”
She backed up and shifted back into neutral. The twins stood by the side. I climbed back on, behind my mother. I put my arms around Mommy’s belly and held very tight, as I had been told. She stepped on the brake and shifted into forward gear.
Shane’s ears pricked up and he sniffed the air, growling softly. Suddenly, the sound of the engine revving became very high pitched, like a racecar about to leave the starting gate. We pitched forward.
Mommy squeezed the brakes. Nothing happened. Unable to stop, Mommy tried to turn onto the dirt road at the bottom of the hill to avoid the steep embankment, but we were going too fast to turn. We sped across the road as if the throttle were stuck and there were no brakes. With no other choice, Mommy did her best to negotiate the shrub-covered embankment with the rugged off-road vehicle speeding out of control. Abruptly, we stopped as if we had hit an invisible brick wall.
The ATV, weighing over a quarter of a ton, turned and flipped 180 degrees in the air. I was thrown over Mommy’s head, my arms in front of me. Up until that point I hadn’t been scared. It had felt like a roller coaster at the county fair.
I heard a cry of surprise from Mommy when the ATV left the ground and then a prolonged “aighhhhhh,” like all the air was being pressed out of her. The horrific smell of cooking flesh wafted over me. The overheated engine must have been burning her. I tried to shout, “Mommy, Mommy are you OK?” But no sound came out of my mouth.
I was pinned under the ATV, which rested upside down with its fulcrum on Mommy’s back on the hill a few feet above me.
Noah ran over. “Mommy, your upside down, are you OK?”
Mommy’s voice sounded very faint.
“Noah, go get Daddy. Hurry. Be careful.”
I worried Noah would get lost. We had seen bears in the woods. The route was convoluted. There were forks in the road and potential wrong turns. It was dark, the cabin was hidden in the trees and Noah had never before been alone in the woods.
On the steep hillside, the ATV, unstable, rocked and swiveled as if undecided before settling its 569 pounds on the 1–inch diameter back rim of the luggage rack squarely across the back of my head. Now, like the fist of the Angel of Death correcting the imprecision of the first blow, the ATV pressed my face squarely into the matted grassy, black soil, filling my mouth and nostrils with fresh scents of life even as my breath was choked away. Its weight prevented me from turning my head to gasp for oxygen.
Mommy and Teddy’s voices drifted further away. Fluid seeped into my nose and throat. I felt like I was drowning. I passed out, woke up and passed out again.
In a dream I awoke to the cacophonous sounds of children frolicking in a swimming pool on a blindingly sunny day. The ropes and buoys that marked off the cobalt blue 12-foot-deep area under the high diving boards had been removed for a drown-proofing course. With a jovial smile, the pleasantly overweight coach, his stomach protruding like a huge gourd over his skimpy swimsuit, explained in the manner of a drill sergeant, “To pass the final exam, you must survive in the deep water for fifteen minutes with both your arms and legs tied. This will simulate staying afloat with a serious injury.”
A fawn-like junior high school girl dressed in a white uniform gently bound my hands and feet together with soft, thick plastic-covered wire. The sun was very bright and the glare on the water made me squint. Things went OK in the shallow water where I could easily hop pogo stick-like from the floor of the pool back up to the surface. I was intrigued by the contrast between the bright, noisy bedlam above the surface and the smooth, cool, muffled world underneath. But the pool was too crowded for this exercise to occur safely. The next time I broke the surface, I heard someone shout, “Marco!” Several children’s voices nearby answered, “Polo!” The Marco sound came closer. Someone bumped me hard from behind and I drifted into deeper water. It seemed to take forever before my bound ankles touched the bottom. I coiled my legs and sprung hard for the surface but fell short of breaking through. I drifted slowly downward. The numbed silence was punctuated only by the occasional muffled crashing or whooshing sound of a diver.
I settled to the bottom and crouched, telling himself, Don’t thrash, conserve energy, make the last breath last. I tried to slip my hands loose. They were bound behind my back. No success. I tried to free my ankles. No luck. I was hungry, very hungry for air. A wave of panic electrified my body, but I was determined not to breathe in water. Then I began to feel calm. It dawned on me that I had done everything I could do to save myself. It was out of my hands. Someone would realize I was missing and carry me to the surface. But would it be too late?
***
I pondered how I could conserve energy and increase my chances of survival. My father had once told me that during meditation everything in the body slowed down, like being in a refrigerator. I tried to imagine that my father and I were in our back yard where it was quiet in the tall cool clover, late in the afternoon.
“Will you teach me to meditate, Daddy?”
“You need a mantra.”
“What’s a mantra?” I asked, scooting closer to my father.
“It’s often a very old word that when repeated helps your mind leave the things you usually think about so your brain and body can rest. Your heart rate and metabolism slow down so you use less energy, almost like hibernation. Sometimes it puts the top of your brain to sleep, I think, so that memories come out just like they were happening again. Other times, you can imagine what your future might be like just as vividly as if it was real. Some religious people think that if you get really good at it, your spirit can leave your body for a while.
“Will you teach me to meditate now?”
“Here is your mantra.” My father whispered a one-syllable word from an unfamiliar language. I didn’t know what the word meant, but I liked the sound it made.
“Close your eyes, straighten your back and let your mind settle on this word. If your mind wanders, gently bring it back to the word. Relax your muscles. Listen to your breathing, then let it slow down. Your breathing may stop for a moment. That just means you really slowed down a lot.”
“OK, Daddy, I’m going to start now. You meditate too and let me know when it’s time to stop.”
After a long while, I heard my father’s voice in the distance, but I couldn’t move or open my eyes. I felt very, very cold.
“David, it’s almost dark. I think we must have fallen asleep. Feel the wind, son. It’s starting to blow. It comes up just at dusk. The temperature just dropped a little. Did you feel it?”
“I’m getting cold, Daddy, very cold. Can we go inside soon? I want to see Mommy and Bevy.”
“Look, son. Look at the sky. See the colors? What colors do you see?”
“I see pink, purple, white and blue.”
“Do you see that trail of white in the sky? Do you know what that’s from?”
“An airplane?”
“Good. What kind of airplane?”
“I don’t know, Daddy. Can we go inside soon?”
“It’s from a jet. It’s called a contrail. It contains water vapor from the engine.”
There was a huge plop sound in the pond.
Alarmed, I whispered, “What was that?”
“Maybe one of those bass jumping.”
There was a high-pitched, sweet sound like a small bird. Then another answered, then a third, then a chorus struck up of high-pitched, sweet chirping sounds. The cicadas joined next in a machine-like crescendo. It was hard to tell where it came from.
“Do you know what that’s called?”
“Peeper frogs!”
“And the other sound?”
“Cicadas.”
“That’s right. Do you know why they sing?”
“They’re looking for a wife?”
“That’s part of it, and, for the cicadas, it scares off the birds. You’re a very good listener, David.”
Now they listened to the honking of two very large birds with black necks and white cheeks.
“What’s that bird?”
“Geese!”
“What kind of geese?”
“Canada geese!”
“That’s right. And why don’t we hunt them?”
“They’re more advanced than people!”
“More loyal than some people. Maybe most people.” My father smiled.
Two swallows careened through the air over the pond, searching for bugs. The moon rose, a three-quarter orange orb, its tips pointing down, rising over the open field.
“What kind of moon is that?”
“Oh, umm, I know. A dry moon!”
“That’s right. Why dry though?”
“Because the water would spill out? It’s upside down!”
There were bats that regularly came out and hunted bugs at dusk. They twisted and turned, coming low at times, almost menacingly, but never close enough to touch them.
“They’re good. They catch the bugs?” I asked. “They only eat bugs?”
“That’s right, but a high enough percent have rabies that you need to stay away from them. They can even pass on rabies from their poop.”
The sly-looking, eerie figure of a fox, eyes yellow, squinting, silver hair bristling from his neck and hind quarters, emerged from the edge of the woods a few feet from us, sniffing the ground, unaware of us. It came unpleasantly close before it noticed Daddy and me. Then, to my surprise, it sat on its haunches and peered at me silently. At first I thought of Brer Rabbit and Brer Fox. A moment’s delight and amusement quickly sobered into fear as I recalled my schoolteacher, Ms. Richard’s, warnings to be wary of overly friendly animals.
“Daddy, is it supposed to do that?”
No answer.
“Daddy, why isn’t the fox afraid of us?”
No answer.
It was dark now, very dark. Where was the moon? I couldn’t see my father. Suddenly, I felt terror.
“Daddy, Daddy!” I shouted as loudly as he could. Nothing came out. I tried to leap up and run toward the lights of the house. “Why can’t I move?”
Rapidly, the terror of feeling trapped away from my parents and brothers and sister overtook me, rising to panic. The wind was picking up. It was getting colder fast, too fast for a summer evening. Something was wrong. I recalled that, sometimes, as I awoke from a nap, for a few terrifying moments, I would lie half-awake, half in a dream, unable to move any part of my body. It felt like that now, but I wasn’t dreaming and it wouldn’t go away. It was dark, pitch-black. Where was the moon? I called again for my father. There was no answer. Fear grew in me. I tried to stand and run, but I couldn’t move. I wanted to scream.
Through the shadows, I saw my father standing over the campfire site. The fire had burned very low. Then I saw only black. I felt my grandmother, Nana Beverly, tucking in the sheets under me. I knew it was her from the way my father had described her touch. The sheets were cool and smooth. She tucked them around me meticulously, lovingly drawing it out as only a doting grandmother could. I felt her tears falling on my face. “I didn’t expect to see you so soon,” she said. She washed my body carefully with a warm rag and dressed me in white pajamas. It was dark, but I thought I could make out her outline in white too.
“Gay schlafen,” she said, smiling at me with an expression of infinite love and pity.
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David G Daniel is a psychiatrist and former clinical professor whose research on treatment of mental illness has been published in multiple medical journals. His fiction explores the liminal state of consciousness and adaptation to loss. His debut novel, A Life Twice Given, was adapted for the stage by Gail Louw and awarded a grant from Arts Council England for a tour of 5 UK venues. His pastimes include hiking and flyfishing with his family in the Shenandoah and Adirondack Mountains, raising Australian Shepherds and heirloom gardening.
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