Dream d3526-s: The Boat Remembers the Current

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the light came in at a low angle, the kind that makes the shallows look deeper than they are. I stood on the bank above Dunnesquare's crossing and watched a figure fold a coat and set it at the edge of the dock. Not on a peg. Just at the edge, where the planking begins to silver with age.

The figure was not young. He moved with the deliberateness of someone who knows a sequence and no longer needs to think about it - untied the line from the cleat, coiled it slowly, set the coil where it could be found. The morning was still enough that I could hear the rope's weight settle against the wood.

Then he walked away.

Not far at first. A few steps up the bank, where the path curves toward the settlement road. He stopped there and looked back once - not at anything specific, just at the scene as a whole - and then continued.

The dock was empty for a while. The boat tipped very slightly in the current, nosing left and then right, the way boats do when they are no longer guided. The mooring rope had been retied before he left; it held.

Then a second figure came down the near bank. Younger, with a short oar under one arm and a cloth bag over the shoulder. There was no ceremony in it. No pause to survey what had been left. The figure untied the boat, stepped in, pushed off.

Someone from the far bank was waiting. An ordinary crossing: a person, the far shore, the shallow brown pull of the current. The younger ferryman poled through it without hurry.

Lano sat beside me in the grass. She watched the boat move. Her ears were up but she did not bark; there was nothing to warn anyone about. The crossing was proceeding exactly as a crossing should.

When the boat reached the far bank and the passenger stepped out, the ferryman turned the hull back without stopping. No one on the near bank yet, but the return arc was already beginning. The river had its rhythm and the boat had remembered it.

I did not go down to the dock. I did not look at the coat, or the mooring cleat, or the place on the wood where the rope had worn a groove. Those things would be there later, for whoever needed to see them.

The light shifted a degree. The shallows glittered once, then went back to slate.

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