So here's one to the pigeons and the tugboats on the river. (Part One)

Last week I drove to Memphis to see and photograph my friend Katie swimming across the Mississippi River (which I'll talk about in my next post). I got to our hotel before she and her wife, Jill, so I settled in and tried to take a nap. Lying beneath a thick white comforter and that clean, faint bleach smell of hotel sheets, I tried to relax into the afternoon, this dark room. But I kept coming back to this one thought in my mind. I was in Memphis. Soon I would be in a canoe, floating on the same river that claimed Jeff Buckley's life.

I started to look up information, find out if there was a way to find the spot he drowned. Maybe that's morbid, but considering how much his music has meant to me, and how long I've been listening, I wanted to see that place, try to understand somehow this loss that happened. I was gonna be there anyway. The first thing I found was that I was wrong—he wasn't in the Mississippi—it was actually a tributary of the Mississippi, just before they combine again: Wolf River. The rest of the story I recalled correctly. How he'd been driving around with a friend just before he was supposed to get back to recording with his band. That they'd stopped and he'd wanted to go for a swim. His friend had a boombox. Jeff went in the water with all his clothes, his heavy boots. He was singing "Whole Lotta Love," a tugboat went by, and then he was gone. 

There was a map, locating the approximate place he disappeared. I put my phone down, considered getting back up and going out into the coming evening, finding it now. I opened the curtains and looked out. Stormy skies. Beneath my window, a woman was swimming laps in the pool. I decided to be productive, took out my laptop and started looking for jobs, applied to two I'd been considering for over a week. By the time Jill and Katie arrived, it was time for dinner. 

We hopped in the shuttle the hotel runs to Beale Street. Reginald was our driver, and we told him we were heading to Pearl's Oyster House. He approved. On the way, he asked why we were in town and we prodded Katie to talk about her swim. Reginald was shocked when she told him her plan to swim the river. His response? That's a mean baby. Over chargrilled oysters I mentioned my hope to find the spot. Who's Jeff Buckley? Katie asked. I told her the short version: a singer-songwriter I love, who drowned in the river, 15 years and two nights ago. Drowned? I assured her she would be much better off, not wearing all her clothes and boots like him. Plus it wasn't even going to be where she was swimming. I'm wearing a wet suit, she said. 

After dinner, Jill and I headed on to Beale Street to hear some music and see what was what. It was biker night (every Wednesday) and the street was filled with motorcycles, revving engines, blue lights from ground effects and tourists standing on the sidewalk with cheap beer in plastic cups, gaping at the scene. We looked around at the places Reginald had suggested to us. Clearly the big touristy places. I like this sign, said Jill, to a little hole in between the bigger places. So we headed in, no cover, to Mr. Handy's Blues Hall & Juke Joint. A great band was playing and there was only one place open: the very front table beside the stage. So we grabbed a couple of drinks (the cheap stuff) and took our seats. 

In between sets, Jill and I ended up talking more about Jeff Buckley. I told her about the trips to the ranch when Craig had his fellowship, how late we stayed up, the few of us, listening to that music, of the strange and failed relationship I had there. And at some point, I ended up talking about Duke, one of the guys who used to go to the ranch with us—Tim's friend—because the band had just played "Gloria" and I told her about this great moment in my life where Duke was playing guitar as we sat out on the stone patio around a table, and he started singing my name in the song. I told her about how he used to stand at the edge of things, the edge of the room, the edge of the conversation. That at first I thought he was strange, but I eventually came around to him. That he was actually like a poet in many ways—always observing. I remembered that long ago I'd written a poem about him, and I checked the files on my phone and happened to have it. This relic from the past, from my greenest writing days, of this thoughtful boy who could be anywhere now.

Duke

“That boy’s going to die young and beautiful.”

                                                —Craig Arnold

His tan skin gleamed like new leather

beneath the thin white cotton of his undershirt,

damp and spotted with cheap red wine,

testifying that Yes, he was earthbound.

We sat side by side, him looking through me,

his head filled with Russian novelists

and dingy blankets; He brought one to me,

placed it around my shoulders, then tangled

With guitar, sinewed body like a rope,

sang my name to “Gloria,” made me want

moonshine and tequila, dust in my hair,

naked mattresses and one-night stands,

Made me a woman

whose doorway he was standing in.

Jill read the poem, sitting at the bar table, scrolling through my phone. And she commented on how strange it was, the quote from Craig. That we were here in this place where Jeff Buckley disappeared, drowned, that Craig himself had died younger than he should have, that he would have said these words about someone else. I thought of his elegy for Jeff Buckley, of Craig's own grace and what claimed him.

I bought a CD during the set, and Jill tipped them twice before the music had ended, to help fund their post-show trip to Waffle House. Once the second set was over, three members of the band came and thanked us for staying to the end, asked where we were from, what brought us here.  

The next day, after the swim, after lunch, I parted ways with Jill and Katie and was headed out of town. I was already exhausted and had decided not to find the river place, despite everything. I'll come back another time, I told myself. Best to get out before the rain starts again. I looked it up on my phone and realized I was only a few blocks from the intersection I'd need to get out at. I was even on the right street: the GPS had me driving down Riverside on my way to the highway, back near where we'd put the boat in the water. 

What I found was there was some kind of visitor's center at that intersection. I parked and got out of the car, grabbed my camera bag, tried to make my way to the water, the shore. But there was no easy way down. The hill was steep. A cement walkway and high railing wended above thick brush and trees. I walked from spot to spot, trying to get a better look. And what I realized then was that I'd been in the same water. Looking out, I saw the boat ramp on the opposite shore, Mud Island, where we'd finished in the canoe. I wanted to go down, I wanted to stand, to step onto the sand where he'd last walked. I looked down the line of shore, of lawn and park benches beside me, and calculated the effort to walk to the other end where I could make my way down. My skin was sticky with riverwater. A layer of sand still covering my calves hours later. I longed for a bath, my hair damp with something other than the humid air and my own sweat. 

I headed back toward the parking lot, was caught by a tree glinting to my left. The leaves were three tones of green, the lightest like the patina on copper, the second a bright ultra green, the last—middle and shadow dark like a forest. Surely leaves like these were here then, this tree probably. It was tall enough. Their strange spectrum might have even been visible at night—on that night 15 years ago. I put my camera bag in the trunk. The air was filled with the sweet smell of pipe tobacco; a man sat on a nearby bench, maybe on a lunch break. 

I started the car.