http://photography.nationalgeographic.com/photography/photo-of-the-day/black-bayou-lake-louisiana/

The water flowed by at a languid pace. As ever, the massive trees loomed above the land, two hundred feet high and stately in their dying days. As his boat floated lazily with the current, he wondered how long it had been since they had last had leaves. The thought lasted only a moment. He decided he didn’t really want to know.

The Drowned Kingdom. He knew that’s what they’d begun to call this place after it happened. As a disconnected title to a place he once knew, it sounded vaguely alluring. Like it was a mystery that needed solving. Or a virtuous place lost to some catastrophe that lay beneath the water, pristine, waiting for a savior. For all those years, he held to that image of it in his head and buried his connection to this place. He hadn’t, for decades, felt a need to come back, to see it for himself. In the days just after the collapse, it would have been way too emotional. He had spent every ounce of himself surviving the way out, and no one else had made it with him. The thought of coming back had been… nothing, actually. The thought was too painful. In his mind, this place was a watery tomb populated by the infinite details of a life he had not had the chance to live. Being honest with himself now, he hadn’t ever seriously considering a return.

In those early years, he felt the pressure of being The Last of His Kind. He’d made the determination early on that it shouldn’t be a burden that was shared or buttressed by anyone from somewhere else. Anyone who could possibly understand his position, his lot in life, was in some state of decomposition beneath what may have been a mile of water. Stories had followed him in the early years, and the story always came the same way.

“It’s true,” a barkeeper would say. “The dam broke and that was it. In an hour, the whole place was buried under a mile of water.”

“A mile of water washed it away,” a washed-up lady of the night told her outgoing client on the bordello’s steps. “Every last man, woman and child. It’s terrible.”

“We cannot know His will nor His ways.” Preachers were always the haughtiest, and he’d hated their versions the most. “But his own kingdom is now flush with new recruits, and we can take some small solace that they went together, all of them, into His welcoming embrace.”

In the first few years, when he was a traveler, he had to constantly fight the urge to stand up at that part. More than once he got so far as to tense his muscle, to feel his legs get right to the edge of flexing hard enough to lift him out of his seat to roar his dissent in the booming voice of a king that never was. But he never did. Something always held him back. He told himself it was self-preservation because that sounded better than calling it cowardice.

Somewhere, a raptor let out a satisfied screech. An eagle celebrating a successful morning hunt. The man rowed slowly, without a particular purpose or direction. He eased around the thick base of a tree, then paddled for its neighbor. None looked familiar, and he felt momentarily guilty. Yes, it had been a long time, and it wasn’t the same place. But this was his childhood home. Shouldn’t he recognize, at the very least, the tree on which the palace was perched? 

To this left, a turtle broke the surface, a lazy smile on its face as it chomped on a clump of grass. The little guy must has gone down to the bottom to feed. Somewhere below the underside of his boat, an endless sunken field of grass filled the lake floor. In the days before, those endless fields were covered only in sunshine, vast enough to feed herds so crowded with beasts as to be practically uncountable. 

But that was before. Before the dam failed, or was sabotaged, or simply gave up because what’s the point of being just one thing for an eternity?

At one time, this was the center of a glorious civilization. The people, his people, lived in an elaborate network of tree houses. They clung to the branches, all wood beams and glassless windows that gave spectacular views of the lush green fields out of which the huge trees grew. Bridges were strung up between every branch, and an endless network connected the entire kingdom from one end to the other, highways among the high leaves. 

And everywhere, views. The green fields below were a vibrant carpet for the kingdom. Herds of grass-eating beasts crisscrossed the land, providing a limitless supply of meat for the people and glory for the hunters. Sunsets could be seen from almost every window in the kingdom. Suddenly he remembered the nightly toast, a tradition he had nearly forgotten. At sunset, families would gather to watch the last sliver of sun ease below the distant horizon. They would raise glasses to thank God or the universe or each other for another day successfully lived.

And just like that, he realized this place hadn’t always been that. It had not always been a populated world of tree houses and easily caught herd animals and nightly toasts. There must have been a time, before that, when it was just a field of trees, as quiet then as it was now. The only difference would have been the sound – the whisper of wind through the grass replacing the gentle slap of water against the side of his little boat.

In that moment, he almost became overwhelmed. He could not recall what urge he’d felt to come back here, but he knew it was vindictive. He’d come back to lament what was gone, to see how horrible the place looked without the people and bridges and tree houses and the life. Now he’d come, and nothing of that old world was left. The houses, the bridges, the ladders that led down to the ground were all gone, lost to storms or looters or the undefeated champion Time. He’d come back to see destruction in the unspoken hope that it would justify why he’d not returned in all these years. He wanted to see that it really was ruined, that no one else could possibly have survived, to rage at the world he’d lost. He found the setting he imagined, but not the feeling he sought.

Instead, it was peaceful. It was, he was disappointed to admit, actually quite beautiful. And he didn’t feel any of the anger or loss he had set out to find. The intervening decades had taken from him his only chance at some kind of personal, passive revenge. This place was once a fresh, empty field with growing young trees. Then it was a developed civilization, an adult in full bloom. And now it, like him, was quiet and contemplative and washed clean of old injuries that it simply did not have the heart to keep clutching. 

Nothing can be just one thing. Not forever.

Maybe that old guilty feeling was self-preservation and cowardice.

Maybe this place was a graveyard and a place of peace.

Maybe he could be angry and accepting at the same time.

He’d come back to feed a vendetta that he only now realized he had long since abandoned. He was happy with his life far from here, the life he pulled together with his bare hands after he surfaced all those years ago to find he was the only one left. The last of his kind. King of a drowned kingdom.

It was alright that he never got to be king. He’d been a traveler, then a carpenter, then an adventurer, followed, for a brief and spectacular time, by life as a prisoner of glorious infamy, and finally, and for a long time, an advisor. His life since he’d escaped the cataclysm had gone well, all things considered. And it had done so in large part because he had not been just one thing. And if the dam hadn’t broken, if what was to be his kingdom had survived, he would have been doomed to just the one life, the one thing.

He thought that would have been its own kind of doom, even if that one thing was a King.