When the second prince had thus been gone a long time, the youngest son said he would go and search for the Water of Life, and trusted he should soon be able to make his father well again. So he set out, and the dwarf met him too at the same spot in the valley, among the mountains, and said, ’Prince, whither so fast?’ And the prince said, ’I am going in search of the Water of Life, because my father is ill, and like to die: can you help me?

— “The Water of Life” by Jacon and Wilhelm Grimm http://www.authorama.com/grimms-fairy-tales-51.html

Photo by Mabel Priddy

Hunt’s Hole at Witcher Creek, West Virginia. Long, dark, leafless branches reach to the water’s edge, lines of ink against the untouched snowfall that blankets the woods and marks the creek margins. Heavy rocks, large and small, sit with all their weight in the same position for generations. Used to be you could dive from the biggest rock right into Witcher Creek from this place. Teenaged bodies, skinny from nicotine and hard work, flying like sinewy prehistoric birds into the air and hanging, just for a moment, in the sun above the water, off the rock, frozen in that perfect pose and moment of  everything being right. Nothing can touch them in that place, that sacred place where you are not held down to earth by anything. You fly out over the Water of Life of your own volition, and you are weightless, and everything below you is just that, below you, and when you land you are submerged in something holy.

White marble statues of a baby deer and a blessing angel watch over the ever diminishing water; someone placed the guardians there after a young man in the community was stabbed to death by his own cousin for not going out to get more beer; that’s what my friend and her friends who lived out there and grew up there told me. My friend said the murdered boy was about the sweetest boy you could ever meet. She said that exactly, “He was about the sweetest boy you would ever meet.” She also said the cousin had spent time in jail for scalping someone. Took a knife to another man and pulled his outer self clean off his head.

This was the swimming hole and the baptizing place for many local churches.  My friend was baptized there. There was a man who used to climb up on the rock and dive into the water; he had no legs. How did he get up there? No one could remember, but they remember him diving, diving off the rock into the water that made people disciples of Christ. They remember the water used to come all the way out to the road. It was deep enough to dive in. It used to be.

I take some whiskey up there in my mind. I’m at Hunt’s Hole, on Witcher Creek. It’s summer and I’m in a two piece bathing suit. I drink and watch the sky, pull leaves off of branches and throw them like little scrap messages into the water. Standing up I roll my neck, then my spine, and pull up the bottoms of my suit. It’s foolhardy to drink and swim but no one else is around and I want to feel the water around me, want to feel that moment in the air. I fly, and I feel the warm air and precious minute where the world can’t hold me, I am free. Then I’m falling, and I hit the water, and it rushes over my head and pulls my hair out long and far behind my neck. I push up and burst clean and free into the outside world.

From the rock above I hear a boy shout, “Hell, yes!” I look up to see him, all bones, a stark frame against the suddenly-night sky, white and linear and I realize the water is too shallow now. “Stop!” I yell as loud as I can but it comes out a whisper. The boy freezes in his perfect moment, and another voice says, “Aw, shit, let him go.” My eyes track the voice to a man sitting on the rock, smoking a cigarette and laughing, his legless torso long and straight, my own legs now just ankle deep as I stand up to walk out of the water.