Their cumulative presence, their cumulative awareness, and her cumulative lack of awareness of anything more than the idea of them coalesced into one presence. Many living things saw her, while she saw no living thing. She knew them to be pelicans, cranes, all the living things beneath her in their natural medium and she so out of hers, the fish, the turtles, the snakes, not impossibly an alligator, and along the edges of shore and bank and riprap and bush the raccoons, the possums, the bobcats, the owls. She felt other presences on the river and could easily associate them with spirits. She had turned turtle in the accumulation of creekbed that had been moving into riverbed over uncountable periods of time. When she pushed against the creekbed with her feet, the creekbed pulled her further down. She held onto the kayak and pulled herself upward. An old post upturned her and the silt pulled up to her knees in the shallows. But the junction of Big Fishweir Creek and the Ortega River bore many old posts and dockings, perhaps even an old boat or two, just under the water, and the floor from which they rose had piled high from silt from the movement of one body of water into that of the other. Having turned in at Big Fishweir Creek, the dim lights in random condominium windows acknowledged her before the sun rose. It was dark out and the spirit moved upon the face of the waters. Gently floating, the kayak became a part of the Ortega River, bobbing beneath the short concrete Ortega Bridge by the cable warnings and the signs admonishing, “Do No Dredging” in stern Old Testament form. Timucua moved about on these waters 1500 years and more before any European or African did. Moving so slowly through the waters offered her a new way to see the city, and the new way was the old way to see the city.
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