Dirty Fox

[RIS3 4 WAR]

Alex stood on the rocky shore, overlooking the Fox, and sighed. There was a time, he'd been told, when the Fox was as azure as the most beautiful sapphires but that was no more. A nearby paper industry, for years had been dumping PCBs' into the river, polluting its beauty and stealing away its life all in the name of industry. The waves slowly rocked into the shore like a child in cradle pushed by a tired but loving mother. He breathed in, the river was putrid with dead and decaying biomass, but that didn't matter, Alex was a dreamer of sorts. A dreamer who envisioned the Fox as majestic as it had once been, metaphorically he attached the image of the Fox, to the status of Old America, splintered, dying, but with a most glorious history. He breathed out, peering far across the river to where Hmong fishermen, probably from Vietnam, hauled in fish. Yes it was a bad idea to fish in the river, but these people grew up doing so. Alex wondered if culture truly does die when you leave your people behind to carve out new life.

 

He waded forward into the river, its brown murk even now exuded a sense of mirth at having a living soul to embrace. He felt the spongey algae at the riverbed and cringed at the sensation. It was, in a way, that which was forgotten, a piece of history. Alex knew from his lessons that history forgotten is history that repeats itself. Alex went to his knees and shuddered at the icy kiss of the water. Even in June, the Fox never was hospitable, but nonetheless Alex breathed in and out. With a silent moment of reservation, he dived forward into the Fox, into the beauty of it and of Old America. As first son of General Wallace, Alex did have to be cultured in the ways of other nations, however only Old America interested him. He wondered what it was like, to be king of the world and sit in the White House Oval Office. It didn't matter he supposed, he'd sit in the Capitol Building in downtown Green Bay in the coming decades. Perhaps, one day, he along with close allies could unite Old America, and like the Fox, rekindle that old majesty that the ravages of time must have forgotten.

Edited June 17, 2014 by RIS3 4 WAR