BLACK WATER

"Old black water, keep on rollin'" sings my new old girlfriend reciting the Doobie Brothers song from our college days as she dips her fingers into the steely Greenbrier River on our May Day run.

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It was her first West Virginia visit and our first public appearance since reconnecting after my heart-wrenching separation from a seventeen year marriage. As 18-year-old freshmen at Randolph-Macon College, she and I had been drawn together like opposing poles of two magnets. Somehow, in the rush of her new friends and field hockey and my football and fraternity, that attraction only sparked an occasional brush at parties. Now our careers and marriages had taken parallel paths but four hours apart. 

The temptation of meeting somewhere in the middle landed us with a dream of a new life in Charlottesville. The only problems I could initially see were two teenagers whose high school lives I'd be leaving by starting over elsewhere. The elder would soon be off to college, but my eighth grade daughter still needed her father nearby.

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The river is still frigid with snow melt from the higher elevations to the north. We turn back south on the Greenbrier River Trail, following the current that is running dark just before the spring algae bloom turns it moss green.

"This is where I almost lost Ella one April" I gasp, pointing out the bluff where her bike had gone head-over-heels to miss her stalled 10-year-old brother. "She was caught by the greening branches on top of that little tree." 

"It's great you were there for her" she soothes, falling into her therapist's voice.

"I still am" I huff. 

On the night she leaves, my middle brother comes to me in a dream:

"Dave, you can never go back." 

I awake the next morning knowing I'm not yet ready for a new life, in West Virginia or elsewhere.