Fire Solves All Problems Perfectly pt 22

You and your friends fire your bikes down Orange Street, made of old bricks and lined with hundred-year-old houses that have deep porches set up with fancy furniture; Jason takes one look at it all and declares with authority that rich people are assholes. The road is jeweled with puddles from last night’s storm that throw the sun at you from some underworld, and the three of you spray huge fans of water at each other plowing through each and every one.

The trail to the Upper Dam, actually named the Goddan Dam after the man who built it and which everybody calls the God Damned Dam for fun, begins just past the yellow and black crossbars that end the road at the border of the Arlen Home: you read in the paper that the colonial founder’s mansion, buried in acres of sycamores grown right up and into its black iron fence, will become a museum now that the family grandfather is dead. Blowing hair out of his eyes, Jason scoops up gravel and whips it at the Home, managing to hit one of the windows – and then twin Dobermans come barking at you from the porch, biting the air with clicks and ramming their snouts through the fence.

They can’t get us, Tim says with relief, pointing at the fence spears that are too tall for the leaping dogs; he pulls down his shorts and shows them his ass and then you all are doing, telling the dogs to pucker up – by now they are slobbering and crazed, and when Tim steps to close to the front of a gunmetal colored box set at ground level, that beeps twice and then begins retracting the drive gate, they bolt for the opening with a roar. You have no choice really – if you went for your bikes they’d get you in a heartbeat, so with howls of fear you hurl yourself one, two, three down the trail where it disappears into the thorny riverfront brush that rips at your clothes, tumbling you downhill on a rocky grade that dumps you into heaps at the bottom covered in spiderwebs and smeared with blood.

It is cool and damp here; the trees are grown too close to let the sun in. You listen to the dogs snuffling from somewhere overhead but they are unwilling to pursue you, their growls fading as they move on. You help each other up, slapping dust from your clothes, and follow the black dirt path to the base of a wall of century old stone: the Darlington Rail Line is at the top of it, suspended along this part of the riverbank due to the marshy ground. A wide tunnel is built into the wall, the air from inside of it blowing a breeze of dead fish and rank river water as you duck under clumps of beardmoss, your footsteps on the packed dirt echoing. You emerge blinking in the sun; the God Damned Dam is a quarter mile upstream, the river rolling over its blockade in a gleaming hump. Continuing on the path, kicking up explosions of dust, you approach the dam’s sluice system that controls the river’s current, sectioned into a dozen mechanical gates and topped with a long metal walkway that goes from your town all the way across the water to the next. Rolling through it like a thresher the river falls falls twenty feet and turns to whitewater, chewing the jammed up detritus that’s floated down from the North – everything from branches to tires to toys to couches, and once a Winnebago that came down like a barge and wedged, the river tearing it to scrap a little at a time.

People get caught in the dam too, all the time. This was where they hauled out Cavard.