Life’s Currents

by Dewey Dabbar

Joe sat in the high-school geography lesson, impervious to the teacher’s monologue on rivers and invisible to his classmates. The educator spoke of watersheds, of natural springs, and also of confluences—those meeting points between two flows, where one gained power and the other lost its soul and its appellation. But Joe’s attention lay on the tree beyond the football field, a huge American sycamore in full leaf. It was under the branches of such an organism, on a grassy wedge of earth defined by a pair of converging creeks up in the woods, that he had accidentally left his diary. The discoverer of the lost book, a young wit named Marcus, had cemented his popularity by posting photocopies throughout the school of his favourite page, the one on which the diarist declared that he loved plants more than people. After the ridicule had abated there came eschewal, and now his fellow students seldom found cause to use Joe’s name.

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Dewey Dabbar is the pen name of an amateur field naturalist who lives on a large island in the North Atlantic Ocean that an infinitesimal proportion of the Earth’s beings call Great Britain.