He sits on the edge of the spring that he and his neighbor found all those years ago and bows his head in his orange hoodie and those ridiculous camo pants he once thought would distinguish him in the garish high school halls. He has a real struggle articulating the strangeness of his life since it’s now on the brink of real change. Nothing is even over yet; it’s only almost over. Can he vault back to a world where society comes pre-constructed, the neighbors are ever nigh, the cat ever-licks his orange paw in the light of a June morning?
The spring is there, though. It’s quiet and clear, and Cormac McCarthy’s trout and their wimpling fins might speak of something than can’t be made right, that can’t be put back together, but that doesn’t mean the spring isn’t real, or shimmering, or reflective of some abiding, long-term truth, one that outlives lonely men. What does the spring mean? Symbolize? Reflect? Don’t ask the boy as he sits on the spring’s edge. Later he’ll learn about rhetorical analysis and deep readings. Of meanings and interpretations. But not yet. His dad will find him out there, or maybe a brother, or maybe God, and one of them will tell him the truth—that “it,” however elusive, whatever it is, isn’t beyond reach, isn’t gone.
Ten years later, today, he tries to remember whether anyone ever came to let him know that. Maybe he’s got to go looking again, go back, go forward. Go in.
It is good to sometimes go back, look back, think back. I appreciate the poem because Baptism is to start anew.
Once there were brook trouts in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery. - Cormac McCarthy