As a child I dreamed of sea lions. Sometimes I saw them sunning on rocks or swimming off the Southern California coast. I wanted to be one, I think. They were the closest thing to the mythical half-human, half-fish mermaids who dwelt in the depths of the ocean. Living landlocked as I do now, there was once a time when I would remember those dreams and feel like a stranded mermaid. Sometimes, I still do.
Two white noise machines in my house, one in my bedroom, the other in my living room, are set to the sound of crashing waves. And an empty aquarium I never bothered to disconnect after the last fish died continues to drip water back into the tank from the filter uptake system. I listen to my white noise machines and my aquarium and can’t forget the sea; I don’t want to. So when I stumbled across online images—green, peaceful and utterly ancient—of the Hamilton Pool Preserve last May, I took it as a sign. I was being summoned back to water in the middle of Texas.
Located an hour west of Austin, the pool was formed millennia ago when a limestone land dome covering an underground river collapsed. In wet years a 50-foot waterfall tumbles from the top of a stalactite-filled grotto and into the pool. But the heat—its endlessness over two years and more—has taken a toll: what remains is a shimmering fringe of droplets. The sound is still hypnotic despite the lack of visual drama; ghostly, even, like the fading drumbeat of an era passing out of existence.
As it happened, though, I would have to wait five months to see the place. Advance reservations were necessary since the park only admitted 30 to 35 people per twice-daily three-hour visiting periods and almost all available slots had been booked from June to October. The habitat surrounding the pool was fragile; and in the years before restrictions, too many people had overrun the place and destroyed the vegetation. Things were better now and the park wanted to keep it that way.
A rocky half-mile trail took me into the small canyon. Once at the pool, I hesitated to take my boots off. The shore was hard and pebbly—torture for bare feet. The water was chilly: 68 degrees, if not less. My inner mermaid didn’t care but I did. Twenty minutes would pass before I could stop cursing the cold and let the mermaid kick out for a swim. Apart from a few other bathers, the place was empty. A slow-moving brigade of catfish patrolled the pool as if to remind us we were their guests. Tottering up the rocky beach, I saw shells, hundreds of them. A park ranger watching over the pool told me they came from freshwater mussels. There are fossils here, too. I bent down and found a small piece of limestone imprinted with what looked like the fin of an ancient fish. Though reluctant at first, the ranger let me keep it along with a small handful of shells.
Holding the fossil in my hand, I closed my eyes and saw a wide blue expanse of water. My Pacific. My beautiful Pacific. Then I remembered something someone had told me about Texas having once been submerged under a prehistoric ocean. My eyes flew open. Was that what I had seen in my mind’s eye? When I returned home that night, I learned that hundreds of millions of years ago, a large body of water called the Western Interior Seaway had covered Texas and most of the Midwest. Bounded by the emergent Rocky Mountain chain to the west and the Appalachians to the east, the seaway stretched south from the Arctic Sea to what would later become the Gulf of Mexico.
It didn’t matter what ocean I had seen. I’d been near water: and that water had worked the calming magic I didn’t know I’d needed. It had been a year of too much. Too much in the world, too much in my own life. Heading down another trail that followed a small creek that branched west from the pool to the Perdernales River, I stabbed my trekking poles hard into the earth and cursed the jagged stones that made me trip and lose my balance. Sometimes I surprised myself by the sharpness and the rage that seeped out. That too much—the wars, the heat, the chaos, the sheer immensity of human evil and stupidity—all of it had taken residence within and battered me.
Halfway to the river, I heard a rustling sound. A pile of dead juniper branches and oak leaves moved nearby; suddenly a small armadillo came into view and blinked. He didn’t see me; armadillos have notoriously poor vision. But I have no doubt he could detect my scent because armadillos could smell just as well as dogs. For as long as hunger drove him; and he could care less that a human had caught him rooting around the underbrush for beetles, grubs and cockroaches.
With his silver armor and clawed feet, he looked like he belonged to the same prehistoric era which gave rise to the Western Interior Seaway. Yet his strangeness also made feel close to him. The armadillo may not have come from the ocean or know it the way I did. But like all armadillos, he could swim and hold his breath underwater. Even walk on the bottom of creeks and rivers if the occasion demanded it. He was solitary, too, and I understood that, just as I understood his need to burrow in quiet places. We were fellow aliens, the armadillo and I: he with his anteater-like nose and armored body and I with my two legs and mermaid dreams of the sea.
And then I realized it. No stranded mermaid, I had evolved to become like the armadillo, digging, digging, digging to get to the root of things. A smile spread across my face. In the greenness of a small forest growing at the bottom of an ancient sea, I had eased the ache of my own powerlessness by feeding my soul.