📖 Shapeshifting

A Marcellus Story

Hello from very rainy Maryland. As I wrote that, our resident heron landed on our dock, stretched very tall, and stalked to the other edge before leaping and gliding to our neighbor’s dock. I could watch this bird all day. Seriously. I’ll go ahead and take it as a blessing to share this story that’s been in the works for five years. Hope you enjoy it.

The stories in this collection are set in the Marcellus shale fracking region of Northeastern Pennsylvania. Originally the home of the Lenni-Lenape, the Munsee Lenape and the Susquehannock, whose descendants live there still. I’m interested in how we, trapped and complicit in destructive systems we hate, might find a way forward. Holding wonder, humility, and awe in the same trembling hands as our grief, fear, and anger—with love and compassion.

---

Waterlight silvers air

Featherbreeze riffles water

Cloudshards hide sun

Brothersteps thump wood

Hank Cowan sat rigid with fear in a slender, tippy shell in the deep end of Princeton’s indoor pool. Coach Jason looked on, bored.

Who is this punk to judge me? Hank thought. He joked, “Is this a record for how long it took someone to capsize?”

“By far,” Jason said. No hesitation, no irony.

A wave of spite pushed Hank’s body sideways. The watery impact erased all training. He flailed in animal panic. The kid had to enlist a fellow trainee’s help to drag his dead weight out. Shaking and incoherent, Hank had passed out on the cold pool deck.

The training dragged on. Hank railed at his therapist. She insisted he stick with it, the sadist. He managed only by dosing with an extra Xanax before. Jason wrote him off, but Hank showed him. He showed them all. Cowans never quit.

Cowans never quit. His father’s exhausting mantra.

Brothersteps stop, edgebalance

Heartmind thumps not-here

Angerfear saps

Brotherbody slumps

In the pre-dawn chill, wind swells bounce the single shell against the dock. Jason is late. Again. He’s barely old enough to shave, a double major in physics and beer. After today’s final lesson, Hank will be able to row on his own. Club rules: no certification, no boat.

His phone dings. Jason. Can’t make it. Sick. Undergrad code for hangover.

Hank feels hungover, too. Yesterday’s meeting with his father keeps replaying on loop.

“We’ll sit with the lawyers tomorrow,” Henry Sr. had said. “This heads up is a courtesy, but until then it’s entre nous.” The man came of age in the Texas oilfields. Why he says such bougie things is beyond Hank. “We’re planning a week of big news: board meeting, shareholder call, press conference, climaxing in a blowout with a jazz band and—”

“Who is it?” Hank had asked, coming up blank after mentally scanning the C-suite org chart. No one was more worthy of CEO than himself. Someone from outside? Surely he would’ve heard rumors.

Henry Sr’s smile was cool, enigmatic. “Between us only.”

Right, Hank thought, thanks for the translation. He nodded, blinked, waited. The sudden warming in his father’s eyes, the smile that always sent a shiver down Hank’s spine: his answer before the answer.

“It’s going to be James. United Energy Holdings has a bright future ahead, son. Who knows where the next generation will take us?”

Straight to hell. Hank’s therapist says he has “a fear of annihilation.” No shit. Doesn’t everybody? Therapy was meant to help him “reclaim his existence.” Only to have it snatched back again and again by his father.

Wrigglemeals dart silver

Perchfeet launch

Edgesettle to stand, wait and watch

Wrigglemeals dart silver

Screw Jason. Hank had woken in the dark and dragged his ass here. After yesterday, he needs this. Still anxious after five months of lessons, he zips his navy windbreaker and steps into the red and yellow boat, shaking, careful to balance his weight. He grips the side rails tight and lowers into the cold seat. No grace to it, but he’s still upright, which counts as a win. He closes his eyes for a deep breath, but the wind kicks a wake that tosses the boat and alerts his lizard brain.

This is a bad idea, it nags.

No shit. Shut up. He clips his shoes into the heel stretcher, tightens the ties. Jason always checks this step, always corrects him. Hank stuffs his unease and shoves off the dock.

A Princeton crew team drills nearby, four to a boat. Their coach circles in a Boston Whaler, barking through a bullhorn. So much for peace and quiet. He needs to gather his thoughts for Round Two: today’s meeting with his brother James and the lawyers. And their father, of course, so smug. Good thing it’s a big lake.

The sun slips free of the low band of pewter clouds. Glitter skips across the water to touch Hank’s cheek but he doesn’t notice. In a few hours, he’ll have his final chance to prove himself to the father who refuses to see him for the man he is. But for now, Hank isn’t a beleaguered executive fighting for his life. He’s a novice rower on Carnegie Lake, cursing the October cold. He leans back and pushes past his body’s stiff resistance. The shell accelerates.

Wrigglemeals dart silver

Edgestand, wait, watch

Neckthrust beakplunge

Clamplift pause swallow

Siplake

Rowing is immersion therapy for the panic attacks that have plagued Hank for years and the more recent forgetting. The therapist says conquering his fear of water is the gateway to memory. She’s merciless, but at least by the end of summer, he’s dropped twenty-five pounds. He’s never been this fit.

Apparently, memory loss follows childhood trauma. Hank has few memories before age seventeen but thought nothing of it. People who drone on about their childhoods are self-important bores. Who wants to hear about hiking the Appalachian Trail with your father, making memories for a lifetime? Never their father, of course, but he and James did hike the AT from Georgia to New Jersey the summer after Hank graduated high school. James has photos, which is how Hank knows it happened.

When Hank forgot more recent things like when he and his ex-wife met or his son’s tenth birthday, it was time to get help. Thank God the doctors ruled out early dementia. Losing his mind would be worse than losing a limb.

Immersion is supposed to, in his therapist’s words, “unlock the door to memory.” She assured him his condition wasn’t rare or special, which disappointed him a little. She said that every third person walks around lost in fear and forgetting.

Since he began rowing, random memories have surfaced from before the divorce. He remembered coaching his daughter’s lacrosse team to the divisional championship. Skiing in Aspen. Riding horses in the windy Camargue, salt air pink with flamingoes, his son flying bareback on a white horse. The family walked across Scotland, camped in the Alaskan wilderness, hiked New Zealand. He always drew the line at cruises, even the private ones his ex kept pushing. Riverboats on the Rhine. The Fjords of Norway. No way in hell. All that water.

Wingspread presses and rows

Bodybeing rises and glides

Soars, tilts, banks and drops

Edgesettles to stand, wait and watch

Hank straightens, pulls his shoulders out and down, tightens his abs. Eight intervals of five-minute all-out effort with one minute of coasting. Heart rate 172 on his Breitling Endurance Pro. Arms and legs shaking. Chest burning. He laughs at the sudden rush. He hasn’t been high in years, but this comes damn close.

His steering is still shit. Jason mocked him all summer for rowing in circles. At least he’s graduated from circles to one big arc. He’s across the lake now, behind one of the islands, out of sight of Boston Whaler guy. His mutinous mind starts up. Flimsy boat. Lake full of water. No rescue. IDIOT.

He closes his eyes to try the body scan his therapist taught him. But it starts with his feet, which are trapped in shoes bolted to the boat. Panic jangles through his torso, leaving rubbery limbs in its wake.

Rowing training had begun with a video. “Your boat is your life raft. Never leave it. Worst case, haul up on the overturned hull and paddle to shore.” A guy rolled sideways in an indoor pool and turtled, popped to the surface, positioned the sculls, righted the boat, climbed in. “Free your feet first,” the voiceover said. Right then, Hank had vowed never to capsize.

Stronglegs stalk, stalk, stalk

Longneck turns waits watches

Wrigglemeals dart silver

Neckthrust beakplunge

Behind the island, he tries breathing in to a four-count and holding it before a slow exhale. But the aquatic reek nauseates him. He coughs out the breath. Too jacked from the exertion, his body greedy for oxygen.

In the pool for capsize training, the geometry of blue lane lines and clean grid of white tiles had done nothing to tame Hank’s dread. A girl in their group had executed the drill perfectly. Then an old guy. Then it was Hank’s turn.

There’s movement on the shore ten yards away. A great blue heron perches on a submerged branch, wriggling fish clamped in a razor beak. With a head-toss, the fish disappears down its long gullet.

The teardrop body floats above the log. Legs, spindly as an old woman’s finger, blend with shadows on the shore beyond. Front-on, the bird is barely there. A vertical sliver cut from water, shoreline, trees.

His mother had loved herons. Or was it pelicans?

The heron turns, shapeshifts into a pewter soup ladle. Steps into shallow water with the solitary coiled energy of an edge-dweller. Mesmerized, Hank’s pinned feet feel each step. His head swivels like the bird’s.

Its neck reaches snake-like from hunched shoulders, then retracts. Hank’s chin pushes forward and tucks. He swallows. The bird singles him out for a piercing stare. Its black eye rimmed with gold has him pinned.

Brotherbody boatbalances

Fearbreath heartskips

Eyepair watches

Heartmind thumps here

Hank can’t look away. He falls awestruck into the bird’s fierce strangeness, its pure wild belonging. His chest aches with a homesickness he doesn’t recognize.

He wrenches from its gaze to bend and stretch for his phone in the small drybag beyond his toes, one hand on the oars for balance. He manages a few shots and the start of a video when the heron croaks and leaps into the air.

Squawkhonk launch

Wingspread rows and rises

Six-foot wings deploy like the time-lapse of a blooming lily, tight bud to extravagance in an instant. The breeze-sound of flight disarrays Hank’s chest, pulls his gaze aloft, phone forgotten, until his mind floods with her trailing wing feathers, the delicate scribble of feet extending from her torpedo body, the neck tucked in a tight S, the beak slicing the air.

Necktuck legstretch

Bodybeing streaks and glides

An oar pokes Hank in the ribs. He recoils, off-balance, overcorrects and topples in slow, unsalvageable motion.

The water claims him, his body and his mind; and, in a rush, wholly, fills him with a fear that is at once foreign and familiar, that wakes him, freezes him and opens him up; alerts him to its greedy intent to strip him as a fish is flayed, as a hostage is bagged; denies breath, so that Hank can't feel the surface, only the panic, can't know the offer, only his refusal; and hangs there, inverted and blind, arms flailing in the underworld muck.

Release the shoes! Release the shoes! The shoes! But this is the whole world now, an alien place intent on killing him. Dim, shadowy shapes circle.

Body bloated with the imperative not to breathe, he fumbles the shoe release, panic choked, lungs burning, mind funneled to a single purpose to find the impossible surface, but gravity answers, tugs his boggy body deeper into grasses and mud. He lashes out, dying to breathe, it would be so easy just one breath, all the training gone, uncanny calm teases his edges.

No no no no, gurgles some part of Hank’s lake-claimed mind. Not here, hell no. He yanks his feet free, shoves the boat from him, flails out in blindness and with one hard thrust of his legs he breaks out. He lunges forward in defiance and scrabbles onto a revolting muddy strip that barely qualifies as land.

The rotting swamp stink assaults him, coats the back of his throat with metallic sludge. He retches spittle and hacks up bile and phlegm and who knows what, disgusted at his body’s eruptions. He can’t trust anything now, he belongs nowhere. His limbs feel provisional, slime scales his skin, grasses trail off him like feathers. He howls.

Hank rolls onto his back, but still can’t breathe right. He unzips his sodden jacket and imagines gills where ribs once were. He could slip into the water and dart away into the shadows before the heron sees his cowardice and devours him whole.

He claws his useless body to solid ground, coughs up rust-colored water, and defies gravity to drag himself upright. There she is. Fishing. So close he can hear her feathers rustle.

Wrigglemeals dart silver

Neckthrust beakplunge

Clamplift pause swallow

Siplake

Water drips from the heron’s slender beak. Her body is wet and cold and she doesn’t mind. All her needs are met. She just stands and waits. Quick twist of her head. Her gold eye, so wild, dissolves a knot in Hank and unspools a memory-dream.

He’s wet and cold. They both are, shivering brisk from the ocean, their shared love. Hank’s mother pulls a soft blanket from the weathered porch basket. He burrows into her lap, small boy. She wraps them both in a snug cocoon. The blanket smells of salt and sunlight.

He’s drifting off when his mother kisses his wet hair. She points. “Look, Henry!”

A squadron of pelicans pierces the sky, buffeted by wind, held aloft by a trick of design and geometry and will. “Aren’t they magnificent?” Lulled by her warmth, Hank forgets to shove the memory away before the rest rushes in. His mother rises, says, “Watch me, Henry!” and floats over the damp sand to the shore, where steely waves beckon in her native tongue.

He wants to yell, to warn, to stop her but she can’t be stopped. She’s a storm cloud massing, a summer downpour, a waterfall. Unstoppable. Full of life. Until she wasn’t.

Burying that day had buried it all. He thought the sacrifice was worth his peace of mind, but his mind has never been peaceful. Everything good went into that hole—their shared love of the ocean, her infectious joy and daring, the answering flame of his heart when her smile shone on him alone.

What the hell happened? his father had asked when he found five-year-old Hank wallowing at the edge of his world, scoured by sand and sea and mute from screaming. As if words could hope to approach the finality of her departure.

Hank’s cheerful red and yellow boat bobs yards away on Carnegie Lake. He imagines wading into the cold water to pull it to shore, but instead convulses in shivers and snivels until he is spent. He can’t call for help; his phone is lost in the waste of the lake bottom. His hands, his strong hands, shake uncontrollably.

Hypothermia addles his mind and he returns to his boyhood skin, sheltering long days at the hidden pond on his family’s sprawling Long Island estate. Desperate to be anywhere but in that house with the woman not his mother, her new baby James, his father’s sickening happiness.

That summer, Hank befriended water skimmers, mayflies, minnows, squirrels, sparrows. The minnows darted and dove, their jittery movements mesmerizing. Filtered light glinted and refracted in the clear water at the pond’s edge. Little Hank made shadows with his moving hands, conducting an ochre orchestra. The school of tiny fish scattered, regrouped, scattered, reformed, joyful dance of play and response.

He daydreamed himself there when he wasn’t and invented new games when he was. He brought gifts and launched tiny boats of sticks and leaves in tribute to the fish and insects. He stole nuts for the squirrels and told them fanciful stories. A red-bellied woodpecker and a nuthatch listened and sang their response.

In the fall, he was sent to boarding school. His long-anticipated return was blocked by orange construction fencing and a massive yellow excavator. His father eager to show off plans for a new barn to house his vintage car collection.

A violent shiver reanimates Hank’s body on the cold ground. He pulls his convulsing torso tight against bent knees and eyes the boat, his only means of escape. The heron watches.

Eyepair stares

Feargrief saps

Heartmind sags

Brotherbody slumps

Henry Sr. had promoted Hank’s brother James to V.P. a year ago over more qualified men. James would be Hank’s eyes and ears in Pennsylvania’s Marcellus region, their new natural gas venture. Hank welcomed it. Much was likely to go wrong, and he could use a fall guy. Instead, James had crushed it, increasing land leases fivefold and implementing strict safety measures unknown in the industry. Lawsuits were settled. Profits soared.

Their father calls Hank a “good soldier,” ominous in his veiled way. “Soldiers and generals,” he always said, making it clear which he respected more.

“It’s a question of leadership and vision,” his father had said at yesterday’s meeting. “You are not CEO material on either count. We both know it.”

“I take strong exception,” Hank had blurted, surprising himself with desperate boldness. “I’ve worked my ass off for twelve years serving this company. I’ve created value—” He stopped, winded, to draw a shaky breath. “I’ve put you first, always. My marriage—"

His father raised a hand from the single folder atop the replica Resolute desk commissioned by Hank’s grandfather. The pointer finger was lost in his roughneck years. Wrinkled and veined, his bony old woman’s hands had always bothered Hank. A powerful man should have powerful hands.

His cold sled-dog eyes said, That’s your business.

Wrigglemeals dart silver

Heartwill rallies

Longneck turns waits watches

Brotherbody rises

Hank staggers to his feet. Fuck you, old man. He pulls the boat to him and braces it with a foot while his shaking hands zip his expensive ruined jacket which he will later throw in the trash before he enters the house.

He pushes the boat into the cold water and climbs in, pulls an ab muscle trying to force his balance. He jams his unwilling feet back into the cold wet shoes still clipped in the stretcher. It takes three tries to tighten the heel ties. This time, he remembers to leave just two fingers between the heel stretcher and the shoe. Jason would approve.

But he cannot make himself push off from shore. Nothing in his body will cooperate, the shivering has become too violent, his legs are stiff logs, his arms fragile twigs. He slumps over his weak hands, weeping with desperate frustration.

Spent, Hank shakes his head, looks around wildly. There’s the heron on spindly legs standing on her submerged log. With an entirely impersonal air, almost casual, she regards him. A queen. With held breath, he waits for what? A sign? An answer? Forgiveness? Benediction?

Squawkhonk launches

Wingspread opens and rows

With a burst of wings and noise, the heron flies straight at him. Hank doesn’t flinch. Undone by her effortless grace, he focuses on the dark place where white needles of neck feathers merge with her stormcloud teardrop body. His mother’s fierce wildness.

Wingtilt banks and arcs

Bodybeing turns and floats

He could join her, become her, take flight himself. They would tilt and bank and row higher, the lake opening quiet beneath them, its leaden surface splashed gold with morning light. They would bank and turn and see the yellow and red sliver of boat edged by shadows, a lone man twisting, helpless with awe, to watch them glide toward the trees.

Together, they would float toward the wall of green, tip wings vertical to drag the air as if nothing else mattered, because nothing else does. They would retract their wings with a snap, and reach long talons to grasp a high branch all ease and grace. The leaves would close around them with a soft shiver.

Hank gives over to the feel of those sun-kissed leaves brushing the cold from his body. A fierce peace warms him. He sighs, grips the oars, draws a deep breath and strokes the boat into motion. The wind has calmed. The lake is almost glassy, his wake a perfect V. The oars play a pattern of polka dot divots. The sun darts behind clouds then out again, teasing.

His breathing settles into a rhythm to match his strokes. Endorphins flush calm elation through strong muscles. Hank faces forward and rows backward, animated by will.

What did you enjoy most about this story? I’d love to hear from you. Or share it with others by restacking on Notes, via the Substack app. Thanks! You can find more Marcellus stories by clicking on the Stories tab at the top.

Each season, we donate 30% of paid subscriptions to a worthy environmental cause. This story helped to raise $68 for Indigenous Environmental Network, Through a variety of alliances, they’ve been promoting environmental and economic justice issues for over twenty years. Track past and current recipients here.