📖 Thirst, part 2

A Marcellus Story

Hello from Maryland. Today is the finale of our story. You can read part 1 here.

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.¹ 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.

In part 1, Cleone, a homicidal water spirit with an authority problem, defies orders not to meddle with Undine, a teenage girl hiking with her father, Hank. Instead, Cleone tries to recruit Undine to help defend a stream under assault by Hank’s fracking company.

And now, on with the finale.

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Part 2: Reckoning

This way, Little Hen.

Undine pushes on upstream. We arrive at the beaver dam, a thick tangle of logs and branches. No sign of Ornea or any of the others. Good.

“Hey, Dad. Let’s find the beavers.” Her voice is wide with wonder.

“Let’s not. Time to go back. Now.”

She’s already tromping around the shore, pushing through heroic black willow and the others, standing their ground against churlish barberry. Thorns catch and pull the nylon of Hank’s jacket.

“Wait, what’s this for?” Undine stops at a waist-high black machine with fat orange hoses snaking from fat couplings. Stiff plastic pipes disappear through duckweed into the pond.

“No idea,” Hank says. He’s lying. I force my way in and grab a memory of his meeting last week with acolytes gathered for a ritual recitation of the Fourth Quarter Projections. A new initiate gave a picture talk praising this very machine, which sucks water from this pond only to imprison it deep in the Underworld. People get up to all sorts of wanton behavior, but this? Defies all reason.

“Someone is just . . . stealing this water?” Undine asks. The beavers click and grunt nearby as they munch willow leaves and twigs. “From them?” She flings her arm beaver-ward.

“So dramatic. There’s plenty of water here.” He wars with himself how much to say, then blurts. “There’s a lease with the landowner, all perfectly legal.”

She gapes. “You . . . you know about this?”

He digs a toe into the soft earth, avoids meeting her eye. “We should get back.”

“‘All perfectly legal?’” She kicks an orange hose. “What are you doing to this place? This water?”

“You don’t need to worry, hon. It’s . . . business.”

Undine flops down on a narrow grassy bank. “Business.” She groans. In her mind, she knows he works in a glass and steel tower in the vast city but seems never to have wondered what he does for money.

Across the pond two beaver kits play and wrestle and gnaw water lily tubers. One is much smaller than the other.

The mother is nearby onshore, combing oil from her cloaca to waterproof her coat. I wonder if she ever tires of the constant grooming.

“It’s a family,” Undine says in a child’s voice.

Hank settles beside her and scrunches his nose. “They smell like ass.”

She watches them, rapt.

“Beavers mate for life,” he says.

“How do you know that?”

He drapes his arm around her shoulder. ‘Your mother told me. On our first date.”

My parents gifted me and Ornea to Apollo when we were about this girl’s age. That’s how things were back then. My mother braided water lilies into my hair and whispered advice that escalated my terror. In stories, naiads are always “carried off.” Naiads “swooned” in the arms of powerful gods and heroes. Stories told by gods and heroes, not naiads.

“Oh, Dad, look,” Undine says. Both kits have latched on to nurse. The mother grooms on, not missing a beat.

“When your mom nursed you, you made cute little sounds. We called you our baby squirrel.” He tugs her close. She relaxes into him. “You were such a sweet, gentle baby.” His voice is ragged with tenderness.

Apollo bragged of his gentleness. But gentle is a lazy summer current. A bay at sunset. Spring rain. An eddy’s breath. Apollo was ocean waves pounding me senseless in the surf.

Undine closes her eyes against the rising sting, the ache in her chest. Her mother hates him now.

Hank closes his eyes against the rising sting, the ache in his chest. “Beavers are the only mammal that alters their environment. Besides us.”

What must this mother beaver think of that pipe thrust into her pond? I imagine she’s already tried to sabotage it with sticks and mud. I know I would, in her place. Now she leaves the kits to slip into the water and swim in a wide arc a safe distance from the pipe. She slaps her tail and whines a warning to the kits, Stay away. A breeze carries her strong musk of Danger. When the larger kit challenges the virtual barrier, she butts him away. The smaller one slips past them and nears the intake pipe before her mother’s interception.

Hank and Undine watch the mother beaver make her body into a sleek raft for her kits. The bigger kit glides and dives and lingers underwater. Hank stiffens.

Ask him about water, I prompt the girl.

“Dad, why do you hate water so much?” Little Hen’s mind scrolls through images of friends’ families wintering in Miami Beach, surfing Costa Rica, snorkeling reefs in Turks & Cacaos. Her family hiked national parks, waited in lines at Disney, tromped glaciers in Iceland and volcanoes in Hawai’i. Whenever they fly over water, her father guzzles bourbon and Xanax and hides behind a thick eye mask.

“I don’t hate it. I just . . .” He shifts, frees his arm, hugs his legs to his chest. “When I was your age, . . . well, I drowned.”

Oh, this. Pathetic.

“Like, for real?”

“Oh, it was very real.” He shivers and hugs his legs tighter.

The mother beaver surfaces. The babies crawl over her and they all submerge. Hank draws in a sharp breath.

“What was it like?”

He exhales, stretches, leans back on his hands. “Honey, it was a long time ago. I . . . I don’t remember.”

Men blink a lot, real fast, when they’re lying. Hank’s lids are double-timing. He’s cursed by sweaty nightmares, always trying to fight, pushing to shore. Waves crash and dunk him under, crash and dunk and hold his head, hold and drag his limbs.

“Oh, come on. You must remember something. Tell me.”

“Ask Uncle James, he was there. He’s the one who got me out, God knows how. Even says he gave me CPR, but I don’t believe it. He was only about twelve or thirteen.”

“Maybe he saw it on TV.”

Hank huffs. “Maybe.”

I do love the Wild Atlantic after an October nor’easter, which is when the boy Hank was foolish enough to try surfing. Weak-ass swimmer got what he deserved. Almost. If I’d been there that day, I’d have been sure to finish the job. But that’s out of my jurisdiction. I gobble up his miserable memory. There he is, on his back on rough sand, cold and choking, hacking up seawater and gushing salt tears while his father alternately slaps and curses his frozen face for endangering his little brother.

Well. The Sea Goddess Amphitrite had her chance and she blew it. So high and mighty that woman is. Thinks herself royalty, treats us naiads like servants. Look at her now, choking on a continent of bottles, bags, balls, dolls, cups, nets, foam, flip-flops, toys, trash. Rubber ducks outnumber seabirds, for Hera’s sake! Took a while, but people managed to fuck up even the oceans. They do love a challenge.

“Okay, enough,” Hank says, breathing fast and shallow. “Time to get back.” He stands, teeters off-balance on the uneven ground.

Time to finish what Amphitrite couldn’t. I reach long fingers toward his ankles. That’s it, Little Hen, just a nudge.

But Undine steps between him and the pond edge to steady him. Little bitch. Her betrayal stings. Maybe I’ve been too quick to trust this spoiled girl. Selfish, over-privileged child. With her ripped jeans and highlighted hair, dreaming over tattoo art of dolphins and sea turtles and whales. On that creamy, perfect skin? Crime against nature.

Her ignorance ends here. This way, Little Hen. Follow the pipes.

“Let’s see where these pipes go,” she says.

“Let’s not. We’re leaving now.”

She ignores him to plunge into the forest. We haven’t gone ten steps when a loud throbbing assaults the air. She stops and pivots. “What’s that?”

“No idea.” Liar!

She stoops to touch one of the plastic tubes thrusting through the trees. “It’s vibrating. That pump. The beavers—” She hesitates, torn between returning to the pond and pressing on. Hank looks away.

I zoom to the pond to find the mother beaver frantic with fear, distressed by the noise. She herds her kits as far from the monstrous machine as she can, but the rumbling assault drones on, the insatiable suck threatening to drain the pond in a trice.

Her panic drives me back to Undine and Hank. But my determination falters. With this man eliminated, won’t another take his place? I can’t think about that. This girl must know the truth. This man must die. And if she shirks from helping me? She won’t. She might. I focus on the mother beaver and reach out to the girl.

Focus, Little Hen. Onward. But Undine is still wavering between innocence and ruin, between anxiety for the beavers and the need to see for herself where the pipe leads. To confirm the violence her father’s company is doing.

Undine chooses. Wise girl. She follows the pipes over hills, through tangles of invaders, along poplars and maples felled by Hank’s crews. After a sweaty effort, we arrive at a barrier of orange plastic fencing stretched across bare ground scarred by heavy tires.

To mark their territory, people once stacked loose stones with artful precision. Now they unspool garbage lace to claim, cordon, divide. A light breeze flutters blue, yellow and red plastic pennants strung around the perimeter. Happy fucking grand opening. Hank is thinking the fresh-turned earth, tangy with crushed brush, smells like money.

Go, Little Hen. Go and see, I sing, trying to keep the edge out of my voice. She chose to come this far, but I can no longer be certain of her resolve.

After only a moment’s hesitation, she steps over a droop in the fencing and stalks across the mud, her body a missile of agitation.

“What are you doing? You can’t trespass,” Hank calls.

She does not break stride. My heart soars with her.

“Daphne, come back here right now!”

“It’s Undine, Dad.” Pure venom. My girl is back! She stops at a big white sign, squints to read the tiny print, mouth pinched. His company’s blue and green logo is the one thing Hank can see from where he stands, clammy with dread. He recognizes one of the company’s bullshit disclosure signs. Required by law, they jam them into obscure places where nobody sees what they’re up to.

Hank stands there, guts roiling. Chiding himself for letting this get out of hand. Undine looks from the sign to him and back. My glee bubbles. Now she knows, asshole. Looks like Take Your Daughter to Work Day backfired.

I hold my breath in anticipation of Little Hen’s next act, now that she sees this man for the monster that he is.

Undine starts in before she reaches him, though her strides are long. “That sign—your sign—says you’ll use five million gallons of water a day. Five million? Every day? For how long?” He seems to be inured to her anger, but this. Her anguish. It wounds him. Good.

“That’s pro forma.” He sweeps a hand. “They don’t always use that much.”

“How much do they—do you—use?”

Good girl, I say in a voice cold as winter bells. Make him own it.

“I can’t say.”

“Can’t? Or won’t?”

“Honey, I pay guys to deal with details.”

“But you should know.” Undine drops to a log, heavy with questions.

I hover beside her, trying to ignore the distant pump rudely intruding. I squeeze the girl’s shoulder, let my hand linger. It’s reckless contact and I don’t care. I will pay any price for a chance like this. Even if it means reassignment. All the water needs defending now. Let it out, Little Hen. Let your rage fly.

“It’s your company,” Undine says. Her body burns and buzzes red. Matisse was right after all. He knew the difference between serenity and passion. “That little pond can’t possibly hold one million gallons, let alone five million.”

“Well, you’re the mathematician.”

Ask him how many—? but she gets there before me.

“How many wells are you drilling here, Dad?”

“Look, I didn’t invite you out here for an inquisition,” he snaps. “It’s time to leave. I’ve had about enough of your—”

You’ve had enough?

“Oh, you’ve had enough?” Undine seethes. “What about this land? This water?”

Hank drags a hand across his mouth and chin, heaves a sigh. Weighs telling her his side to win her over, but that’s ridiculous, she’s a kid, she can’t possibly understand. “If I tell you how many wells, can we go then?”

“How many?”

He ticks off his fingers. “Okay. Last quarter we permitted two hundred, drilled forty-nine, fracked thirteen successfully. We signed . . . I think eighty-seven new leases? So that’s—”

“Insane.”

“I know, right? Next quarter, we’ll double those numbers.”

“No, I mean, literally insane. Where is all that water coming from? Where does it all go?”

He falters.

Come on, Little Hen, this way. I’m spellbound to distraction by the pump’s rumble. What that poor mother beaver must be feeling.

Hank looms over Undine. “We’re extracting a critical resource, Missy. We’re responsible for—”

Undine stands and stretches to her full height and gets right in his face. “Responsible to who?”

Smart girl, he thinks as he steps back. She’ll be a first-class CEO once she grows up and faces facts. “First, there’s the fiduciary responsibility to our shareholders. You know what fiduciary means?”

“Fancy word for money.” She doesn’t hide her contempt, clever girl.

Ah, she’s clever, Hank thinks. He can’t suppress his smirk. “Our investors put their faith in us. We don’t take their trust lightly. There’s only so much money out there.”

Oh, they do love that false story. They made up money and then they hoarded it, so they made up scarcity. All the while surrounded by true abundance.

Scarcity is a lie, Little Hen.

Undine turns in a slow circle, arms sweeping wide. “Scarcity isn’t real, Dad.”

It’s all abundance.

“Look around.” Undine stops to face her father. “It’s all abundance.”

“O-kayyy. Don’t worry, when we’re done drilling, we remove all our equipment. We regrade and plant grass and trees and it’s good as new.”

Liar. He tells himself that to feel better.

“Maybe you feel better with that, Dad, but I don’t. Don’t you ever worry about the water? About all this, this, pollution?” Undine waves her arms with impotent rage.

Pollution, now there’s a word. When I was this girl’s age, before I was given to Apollo, there was no such word. A shepherd might shit too close to a stream, but isolated mistakes resolved quickly. Pollution was invented by people who squandered their belonging in self-exile.

“Well, there are tradeoffs. Sacrifices.”

He speaks of sacrifice but makes none himself.

“Who’s making these sacrifices? Not you.”

I could warm my hands in the flames of Undine’s anger.

Hank stuffs down self-righteous thoughts of spoiled kids and suburban commutes, private-school tuition and divorce settlements. She needs to know, to understand. He resists correcting her, heaves a sigh, and continues his lecture. “And we’re responsible to society at large. We’re on the front lines of Energy Independence—”

“God, Dad, you sound like a cartoon villain.” The pump barges into her mind with its dread urgency. “We have to go check on the beavers.”

“Honey, you worry too much. Everything we do is highly regulated.”

And there it is: regulation. Pollution’s miscreant cousin. A word coined by the Romans to straighten and rule Earth’s shapely curves. As if Gaia could be so easily subdued.

Undine scrambles back in the direction of the pond. “What about all those chemicals you dump into the water?”

“Who told you that? That hippy science teacher of yours—”

“Dad. I’m informed. I’ve seen the videos. Kitchen faucets flaming, people with rashes from their own showers. Kids with asthma. Farm animals with cancer—"

All the way back, she rants, shouting over the pump’s drone. “How do you clean the water, Dad, once you’ve used it? Answer: you can’t.”

At the pond, the pump is still running. The intake pipe shudders. A whirlpool menaces the surface where the unseen mouth sucks. Undine’s mind jumbles with outrage and worry. We search and find two beavers. Where’s the little one?

“We’re working on recycling the water,” Hank says. “Then, we can just put it back after we’ve used it.”

“You’re delusional,” Undine says. “Once this water is used, it’s gone. Poisoned. Dead.”

That’s not all that dies, Little Hen. My misery boils over. See? I float to the whirlpool five yards from shore and hover.

The mother beaver dives right into it. After a moment, she surfaces, dragging the small kit with her, retrieved from the pipe’s maw. The sibling follows behind. Onshore, she nudges the wet brown body once, twice, a third time. Undine gasps and lurches forward. The mother slips into the water to slap her tail and screech-grunt.

“Back up!” Hank says, scrambling after his daughter. “She’ll bite you.”

Undine stops beside the lifeless animal, crouches, reaches out. Her father yanks her arm away. “Don’t touch! It’s diseased.”

The mother grips the remaining kit in her mouth and paces the water with powerful strokes.

“Poor little one, she’s—” Undine’s sob chokes the terrible truth. Drowned, Little Hen. Drowned.

The pump shuts off. Into the thick space of silence, Undine wails. She staggers to her feet to kick the intake pipe with her black boot. “Murderer!” Kick. “Evil!” Kick. “Bastard!” Kick.

“Watch your language, young lady,” her father says.

She rounds on him. Shoves him hard in the chest. He falters backwards, trips, lands on his butt, scrambles to his feet, sputtering. “Daphne, what—”

Shove. “It’s!” Shove. “Undine!” Shove.

Hank’s arms cartwheel with each backward stumble. The final thrust topples him in a slow arc. Right into the water.

That’s my girl! I sing-shout.

The mother beaver torpedoes directly for him, a sleek brown missile.

Hank screams. Blinded by panic, he founders deeper into the pond where his harried feet contact only floating bladderwort and unwelcome hydrilla.

I shoot to where Hank flails, pull him farther into the pond, and press his head down with glee. Let’s finish what Amphitrite couldn’t. Bubbles burble.

“Dad!” Undine screams from shore. She plunges fully dressed into the water with determined giant steps. Her heavy boots drag, but on she pushes.

Won’t be long now, I sing in my best aria, fueled by the flood of Hank’s trauma, powerful as those Atlantic waves and twice as vengeful. Soon, his pathetic floundering will subside into the sweet relief of defeat.

Hank kicks and thrashes arms and legs, as if climbing an invisible ladder.

“Daaddyyy!” Undine now plunges headfirst and strokes toward her father with swift, powerful rhythm.

Apollo dragged me alone across his violent spring rapids and pinned me upside-down between boulders and snags. Fathomless, he hoarded me, tied to a stone, in his dark depths. He spurned Ornea and tormented me. Ornea piled on, said I was selfish, I brought shame to the family. She knows nothing of shame. She doesn’t even know that water is wet. The water weight of Apollo grew with every baby I bore him, a child myself. And when after an eon he tired of using me and sent me away, spent dry, Ornea laughed and mocked me.

A whirlwind assaults me. What have you done? Ornea screams into my face. I was having so much fun I didn’t notice her coming, she who failed to protect her little sister from Apollo’s insatiable appetites. Ornea grips my upper arms to pull me off Hank. But I’m the stronger one now. Not the neophyte trembling before the looming god.

Not me, Sister, the Little Hen. Now butt out. I push Ornea’s head under. I’ll drown the bitch if I have to. Payback.

Hank’s pale face, trailing pondweed, breaks the surface. He coughs and sucks in a greedy breath. I claw at his mouth, but Ornea restrains me.

I twist away to grip her shoulder and punch her in three quick thrusts to cheek, nose, mouth.

Undine approaches Hank from behind to reach an arm across his chest, but he turns around, slippery fish.

Ornea darts away from me.

In his panic, Hank encircles his daughter in a bear hug, then thrusts her slim body down to elevate his own above the water.

Hell no! I yank his head back by the hair to release Undine. Not on my watch!

Undine slips away, gasping, sputters, “Dad! Relax,” darts around him again, breathing heavily, tries once more to grip him from behind.

She’s supposed to help me finish the job, what’s she doing?

Hank turns around to push on Undine’s shoulders and head, to climb her like a sapling.

After Apollo’s rejection, Lord Pan played his sweet flute while I wallowed in wetlands, hidden among the leersia and the glyceria, the ibis, the eel and the shrimp. Pan made no demands.

I choke Hank’s neck with my long, strong fingers.

Undine floats away facedown, exhausted. Horrified, I release Hank to turn the girl over and tow her to shore.

Ornea follows with the flailing Hank. There, on the reeking shore, he retches spittle and hacks up bile and phlegm.

Undine shivers and convulses and gags on hands and knees. The dead baby beaver lies inches from her numb face.

No, sister, I say to the mother beaver angrily pacing the water. Let her go. Ornea hovers behind the grieving mother.

The beaver stops. Undine looks up to meet her bright brown-black eyes. The remaining kit clings. The mother blinks and stares. Undine stares back as a warm yellow light blooms from the bud of distance between them to coat their bodies and gild the water, the shore, the machine and pipes, the trees, the sky. The dome of light suffuses its ancient language into the girl’s cracked-open heart.

Undine weeps, senseless with love. The long moment glows. She turns to touch her father’s cold face.

Whenever I reunite with cordgrass or pelicans, I hear Pan’s music. I hear it now in the girl’s tears, in her crazed, athletic, heroic love for her father, the monster she loves without reservation.

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Up next

This Thursday, 20 June, I’ll publish the Summer Solstice debut double-issue of NatureStack, a monthly journal of shared wonder—nature writing, photography, art, music, and story—gleaned from Substack and beyond. I’ve long been enthralled by the quality of the work here. It’s been a joy to gather these gems and share them with all of you. Subscribe and it’ll come to your inbox.

The nature writer interview series (in search of a name ~!) will debut on Thursday, 27 June and run weekly for five weeks. After that, it’ll be a regular feature (frequency TBD). I’m so inspired by the depth and sensitivity of the responses and I know you will be, too. If you’re interested in answering the 6 questions, DM me.

1. If you’re curious who lived where you live now, this map is fascinating and invaluable.