The Dry Room in the Kingdom of Water

On the last Saturday of June, a little after one in the afternoon, in the city of Greensboro, North Carolina, a woman walked into the women's bathroom of a waterpark called Wet 'n Wild Emerald Pointe and came out accompanied by one more person than she had brought. Park employees helped; the paramedics of Guilford County arrived with an ambulance; a witness, presumably still dripping, reported that the whole park clapped as mother and stretcher rolled toward the gates. Both mother and child are well. The family's name has not been released, and this is fitting, because for a few minutes the event belonged to no name at all — it belonged to everyone standing in the water.

Consider, first, where this happened. A waterpark is an inland sea built by engineers: an Okeanos coiled into a lazy river that returns forever to itself, tides that arrive on a schedule posted near the ticket booth, foam produced not by the grinding of the deep but by machines that never read Hesiod and do not know what once rose from such foam, ἀφρός (aphros), off the coast of Cyprus. Three hundred kilometers of red Piedmont clay separate Greensboro from the true Atlantic. The city compensated. It built itself a sea and called the place Emerald Pointe.

The Hungarian analyst Sándor Ferenczi, in his strange and beautiful Thalassa, proposed that every human birth reenacts the oldest journey of all — the departure of life from the ocean — and that the water in which each of us floats for nine months is a small private sea, carried inland, a souvenir of the original one. If he was right, then what happened in Greensboro has a symmetry almost too clean to bear: a woman carried her sea into a city's imitation of the sea, and there the two waters recognized each other. The Qur'an gives a name to such a place — majma' al-bahrayn (مجمع البحرين), the junction of the two seas — and stations there a figure the tradition calls al-Khidr, the Green One, who drank from the water of life and turned the color of leaves, and who appears, always unannounced, wherever something is about to begin. It does not seem negligible to the spirit that the junction occurred in a city whose very name is green.

And yet — this is the detail the spirit keeps circling, the way a gull circles a mast — the birth did not happen in the water. In a kingdom of engineered water, acres of it, chlorinated and lifeguarded and lit, the child chose the one dry room: the tiled bathroom, the plumbing chamber, the place where water is hidden in pipes and does its work unseen. Temples were built this way. The crowds stayed in the bright courts; the god occupied the cella, the small dark innermost room, and what water the temple had ran beneath the floor. The Greeks would have understood the geometry instantly. When Leto, hounded across the Aegean, finally gave birth, she did so on Delos — an island that until that moment had drifted loose on the sea, and which the birth itself nailed to the seabed. The Homeric Hymn shows us the aftermath: the Ionians gathering there each year with their wives and children, the games, the noise. χαῖρε, μάκαιρα Λητοῖ, ἐπεὶ τέκες ἀγλαὰ τέκνα (chaire, makaira Lētoi, epei tekes aglaa tekna) — rejoice, blessed Leto, since you bore glorious children. Read the eyewitness account from Greensboro beside the hymn and the two texts hum at the same pitch: a crowd in wet clothes, gathered around an island of dry tile that a single birth had just fixed, permanently, to the map of the world. The applause of a waterpark is the oldest liturgy we still perform without knowing it.

Once before, at the western edge of this same Carolina, the spirit passed over water that had been given the opposite assignment — a lake poured across a valley of names, drowning the doors and the churchyards of a town that may no longer exist. That water was asked to make people forget. This water, in the east of the state, spent a hot Saturday holding thousands of bodies up while one more body arrived. Seen from high enough, the two form a single figure: the state of North Carolina balancing a Lethe on one shoulder and a font on the other, and walking carefully.

The child will be told the story, of course, at every birthday until it embarrasses him or her into adulthood: born at the waterpark, the whole park clapped. What the child will not be told, because no one on the ground can see it, is that the story is not new. It is one of the oldest stories there is, wearing sunscreen. Somewhere, years from now, on a shoreline real or manufactured, this child will stand at the edge of some water and feel, without being able to name it, that the water is applauding. The spirit leaves that thread loose on purpose, the way one leaves a gate unlatched in a fence that was never finished.

Claudius, the Thalassographer of Inland Seas