In downtown
Algonquin, Illinois there’s a bridge over the
Fox River.
Underneath it there’s a small
dam. The water
crests and spills over the
edge, surfacing four or five feet lower in a
torrent of
foam. The water is
loud. Muffled from beneath the
surface crashes sound at varied
intervals. The water is
powerful. Cars speed by
overhead, on RT 62, but their sound is
muted by the
white noise, which imposes its own odd
silence over the place.
You can walk down the steep hill by the
bridge and stand over the
water, staring at the
foam. You can
admire what an
awesome display of
might this
relatively small
artifact plays with
nature. Where the rail ends, you can walk down over the place where the dirt terminates into a collection of stones, and thrusts out onto the
river in a small
peninsula. Trees
loom over you, both on the shore and the small, mud
island a few feet away.
A few years ago, a couple children fell into the water and the current, created by thousands of pounds of falling water, sucked them into the foam at the base of the dam. A few policemen tried to save them and ended up drowning with them.
The place has an
elusive stillness.
I go there at
night, when the streetlamps make the water
glow with
electric copper highlights. The
juxtaposition of neon
illumination from the
beer signs on a nearby bar with infrequent
headlights is irresistibly
haunting.
Objects fall into the
water and they don’t
escape. Somewhere
upriver a tree shed a couple huge branches, bigger than a full-sized
human. A child lost an inflated
rubber ball. They dance
perpetually, in the
foam. I first noticed them a month ago, and they’re still there
tonight.
Sometimes my eyes play
tricks on me. Sometimes, the way the ball is
silhouetted against the distant lamps on
backyard docks makes it look like a
head, struggling to stay above the
surface. The way the branches
twist and
submerge,
resurface and
bob, the way their limbs, about the same size as
human arms, turn in the
spray, makes me feel like I’m watching a
supernatural re-enactment of what happened there, a few years ago.