Melissa French

Mae Nam

I used to dream of drowning, horrible, writhing night terrors punctuated by big gasping breaths and burning lungs in a dry bed. I never remembered each dream, rather it was the sensation of holding my breath that followed into waking life. The dreams persisted into my middle school years, so you can bet sleepovers were rare and awkwardly avoided. My grandmother blamed my mother and her fear of deep water, explaining how her phobia must have transferred into my psyche when she was pregnant with me. 

Visits to said grandmother involve a fourteen-hour plane ride and two months sweating in shorts and t-shirts. She lives in a city called Nakhon Sawan where the two rivers Ping and Nan meet to create the bigger Chao Phraya which flows throughout the rest of Thailand. My grandmother was born in a boat on this river. Her parents made a living on the water, hauling sacks of rice to fill the boat’s underbelly. The extra weight would often cause the craft to sag, water lapping at the edge, threatening to upend the whole thing. And when they had unloaded the pale granules in whichever city they ended up in, she could sit on the side and hang her legs off without even her toes getting wet. All this was told to me from a mosquito-netted bed smelling of tiger balm and sweat, my legs folded to the side at the foot of her low mattress. 

Small reminders of her younger years dot her old teak house; a long, wooden oar hung above a doorway, prayer beads made from clay and river water, my mother’s fear of swimming—traces of a life spent on the river. My grandmother had taught me that life came from water long before Mr. Buchowski’s 8th grade biology lesson. In the billions of years humanity has found itself on the earth, we have pinpointed such evolutionary theories on some notion of a prehistoric organism that had decided it was hungry enough to leave the ocean. I suppose it comes down to the idea that we emerged from such liquidy depths, out of starvation or some other primordial instinct. Darwin’s “warm, wet pond” was something of a revelation.

The Thai word for river is mae nam—“mother water.” I wonder about what this means. To be a mother. To be a river. To be created. I wonder about such things when I walk across the Pasaan bridge, a marker for where the Chao Phraya is born, flip-flops smacking against hot graveled pavement. The river rushes beneath its concrete pillars, waters swirling in swathes of murky browns and Banyan greens. They form little whirlpools in the deeper parts—small vortexes that hide surging currents, powerful enough to pull down a wooden tugboat. The river holds secrets like an old woman; its streaming tides offer life and take it away just as easily. 

My nightmares stopped when I started high school. Maybe it was time to grow up. My mother assuredly tells me adults have nightmares too. I don’t ask her why she recites it like a script, an old record with lyrics ingrained to the tongue. My flip-flops have come apart, the strap tearing through the bottom. It smells like burnt rubber and wet earth. Moisture and condensation, steam rising. My grandmother’s white strands now shine through her hair dye; her face is changing like the contours of a river. My mother has started to slow, sluggish silt along the bottom. Life is born from water; it imitates its movements, cycles and flowing inlets that burst from underground springs and trickle into the vastness of the sea.

My grandmother tells me she dreamt of an empty boat last night. “It was a rocking cradle,” she murmured. The river is loud, fueled by rainwater and gravity. Now I understand why humans build dams. Now I understand the desire for a man’s steady hand. But now I also dream of thirst; a silent raging Tantalus, awakening to gasping breaths and a parched mouth.