I prayed that we wouldn’t, but I kept my thoughts to myself, grasping the sides of the boat just in case one decided to jump up out of the water and tip over the boat.
“Or an alligator!” Maris shouted, just as loud.
I jerked my hands into the boat. “An alligator?”
“Don’t worry, Merritt,” Gibbes said. “If we don’t bother them, then they won’t bother us.” His voice was low and calm, like the one I imagined he used before giving a shot to a small patient.
“But if you see babies, stay away,” said Maris, her face serious. “Because where there are babies, there are mommies.”
I looked at the dock, wondering whether I could jump out of the boat safely. But I thought of Cal, and when I met Gibbes’s eyes I straightened my shoulders.
“Everybody ready?” Gibbes asked, waiting for all of us to nod before starting the motor, the sound abrupt and jarring. After the initial jolt, the motor settled into a steady, low thrum that I grew accustomed to, and didn’t completely override the marsh music.
The first thing I noticed was the smell, the same one I remembered from standing in the front yard with Mr. Williams. Pluff mud. That was what he’d called it. It was a peculiar odor that was green and earthy, part salt and part sea. It was alien and exotic, almost unpleasant, but completely intoxicating and unlike anything that I’d experienced at home.
We’d meandered into a widening creek, the tall grasses that had at first brushed the boat now farther away as we skirted through the marsh on a watery path. Gibbes was true to his word and kept out of open water, always within easy reach of the sandy hammocks that protruded from the marsh like underwater serpents, their salty-soil backs exposed to the relentless sun as the tides ebbed and flowed around them every six hours and six minutes.
I’d never seen a place of such contradictions, barren yet lush, monochromatic yet teeming with unexpected shades of color. It was a constantly changing landscape where nothing was the same, yet nothing was truly altered except for the rise and fall of the tides.
“This is my favorite place in the world,” said Maris. “I don’t think I’ll ever want to leave it.” She kept her voice quiet, an unspoken agreement between all of us that this was a place as sacred as a church, where hushed voices were required.
“Do you have beaches or is it all this grassy stuff?” Owen asked.
Gibbes glanced at me and then over to Owen. “We have beaches, but we’ll save that for another day. Remind me to take you to Hunting Island someday. I spent a lot of summer days and nights there with my friends as a teenager. They have a lighthouse, and you’re allowed to climb to the top.”
A secret smile lit Gibbes’s face, and I wondered at his memories. I imagined they involved beer and music and girls. I could see him doing all those things I imagined teenage boys did: saw him tossing a football with a friend or diving into the ocean headfirst. It was easy to picture Gibbes as the carefree kid raised by the water who took for granted suntanned skin and bleached hair and shirtless nights. But I couldn’t see Cal doing any of those things, no matter how hard I tried.
“I like this,” Owen said slowly. “It’s just . . . different from Lake Lanier at home. Like all the plants out here haven’t had a chance to grow very tall.”
Gibbes slowed the boat, the engine just a low murmur. “In a way that’s true. To survive out here as a plant you have to be tough. They’ve adapted to take all they need from nature while at the same time fight it back. It’s not easy to be covered with water for half the day, and then baked in the broiling sun for the other half. They couldn’t survive if they behaved like ordinary plants.”
Owen frowned for a moment, his mouth twisted as he thought. “Actually, they’re really just ordinary plants. But they’ve learned to survive unordinary events, which makes them like the strongest plants in the world. That’s pretty cool.”
“Pretty cool,” Gibbes agreed, speeding up the boat again. “You see examples of that all over the plant and animal kingdoms.”
He kept his focus in front of him, but I felt that his words had been meant for me. I thought of Cal again, and how two brothers raised in the same place could be so different. How one could survive and thrive and the other not.