Back to Fall 2025
The Glory
Abigail Ham | Nonfiction, Fall 2025
We walk by the Fore River on a Saturday among the reeds, by the marsh where the shore birds gather, looking out at the island where the ash trees hold each other against the wind. In the distance, the Fore River Bridge. Hulking, visible from everywhere. The body that leaps from it that same afternoon, invisible. Lost in the moments of bright sun on the reeds and the gray clouds hanging over the coast.
You wouldn’t know it from the way I’m standing, arms loose, body leaning at angles of comfort over the water, but that water and I have exchanged many long and longing glances.
Once, I went to a pond near my university at the warmest hour of a cold day. I sat by the water with a black notebook and wrote myself a ransom note. I have taken myself hostage and there’s no way out. Please look for me in the water. I wanted to wait there while the temperature changed, to be cold enough to justify the shivers passing through my body. I wanted to lay down at the bottom of the pond with the turtles hibernating in their shells and rest.
On Sunday, I light the candles at St. Chrysostom’s Episcopal Church. I read in the day’s program for the day that they burn to the glory of God, in memory of a recently deceased parishioner.
The sun hits the reeds by the river. A body for a moment poised between the bridge and the freezing water. I do not lie down with the turtles in the pond. The world goes on, turning to the glory of God, and in memory of the way the water ran that particular day, of the rush of days that have poured through us up until this moment – the unspeakable warmth, the cold that doesn’t leave in springtime, the lost, the unlost, and the dead.
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We’re kids and evenings are long. Especially these dark, winter evenings. Light from the kitchen window spills out onto our sledding hill. The farm feels huge.
Every season brings fresh potential for play: fishing and tree-climbing in the summer, piles of leaves and long walks in the woods in the fall, sledding and snow forts in the winter. But spring is the best, and it always arrives — unslowable, inevitable.
I didn’t know the word “inevitable” then, but I know now that’s what it was. On the first warm day, I shed my winter coat. I break out my neon windbreaker from storage and tug rubber boots onto my bare feet. I run on the packed ice of the winter trails stamped by snowshoes or ATV tracks to see if Chamberlain Brook has opened. Spring here is a season of slow explosions. Tulip heads push up through the driveway, robins pop up out of nowhere in the yard, and the brook churns, more alive than ever. Snowmelt rushes through our valley, swift as the season.
My brother and I spend the whole day standing in the churning water. We pass wet stones back and forth until our fingers freeze. Gritting our teeth, we plunge our hands into the current and place the stones on the dam we’re building.
We always build dams. In a picture book at my grandparents’ house, I read about the little Dutch boy with a finger in the dike, how he stood there all night holding back the sea while his tiny finger froze.
I wonder now why it felt that the natural thing to do with a current like that was to prove that we could stop it.
We know the names for pink and gold quartz, smooth-sanded granite, speckled mica schist, slate that shatters between our fingers, garnet and muscovite pried loose from the
streambed or piled on a bank of mud. We repurpose all of it to secure our bulkheads. We fill the water with leaves and twigs and it sucks them into the cracks. The dam seals. A moment of triumph. Then the water behind the dam starts to rise. The banks are high, so it can rise and rise, over the tops of our boots and over our dam. The rocks topple almost in slow motion and as we flee the wreckage our feet squelch in our boots.
Two years after the fall of that dam, two hurricanes bombard the valley with rain, and the brook turns its power from tumbling piles of rocks to felling whole trees, to drowning my parents’ fields and my grandparents’ fields, and to hacking away at the bridge between them.
We learn that all dams, all banks, all fingers in the dike, are temporary; the water will run where it runs.
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We’re driving over Ledyard Bridge between New Hampshire and Vermont. We’ve spent all day at Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center in Hanover, and this is the start of our long drive home.
My parents are talking while I count the street signs obsessively in the backseat — a stop sign, three lane signs, one “Welcome to Vermont” a ways out yet. They’re talking about the bridge’s railings — how they must be meant to keep people from leaping off the side, and how they don’t seem quite tall enough to stop someone.
Or maybe I’m misremembering. Maybe we drove across in silence and, looking back later, when the headlines shouted about a college student dead on the rocks below, I imagined my parents had seen and warned. Often, looking back, I’m tempted to believe that someone could have done something about things like this. I want to believe we can stop everything.
The Connecticut River runs below Ledyard Bridge. Beneath us that day, a late-night thunderstorm had swelled it. A stripped tree trunk is pinned against the pilings. I stop counting signs to search for the border marker as my dad announces, “Welcome to Vermont!” I miss a few signs in the process and in the back of my mind I feel them slipping past us in the dark, their uncountedness throwing curses.
I imagine the border between New Hampshire and Vermont is a long, invisible wall stretched over the river. Once you pass through it, you’re in a new place and there’s no going back.
Did I really think that? I know I looked up to see the border, to guess where exactly it was, but did I think of it as a division between after and before? Did I realize then that even throwing the car into reverse and gassing back over the state line couldn’t take us back to the before?
We had been at Dartmouth for an MRI and a follow-up with my neurosurgeon, but while we were there we stopped by the floor where I had recovered after my surgery to visit a friend of my mom’s, whose son was recovering just down the hall from where I had. My surgeon had also operated on him.
Dad and I sat in the waiting room for hours while mom visited. We read Star Wars books my dad had packed to entertain himself while I was in the MRI. Mine was about Luke Skywalker trying to stop his kid from turning to the dark side. By the time visiting hours ended, it was clear he was not going to be successful.
I had a brain malformation that could be fixed, and it was fixed. The boy in the other room had a tumor that couldn’t be stopped.
That day as we passed through the invisible wall on Ledyard Bridge, I closed my eyes against the onrush of signs.
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It’s a frigid October morning, and I’m giving my parents a tour of downtown Grand Rapids, the city where I’ve lived for the last three years. Growing up, it was rare to go anywhere with my parents that they didn’t run into someone they knew. The places I knew best as a kid were places where my parents' footprints and fingerprints were as deeply embedded as the tree roots and building foundations. It feels strange to be introducing them to a place.
There are dozens of street signs around, but I don’t count them anymore. I know that particular ritual doesn’t stop anything.
The first time I went away from home for a long time was the summer after high school, which I spent working at a summer camp in western New York. My parents had driven me out, and we had stopped on the way at Letchworth State Park, near their alma mater’s campus.
I remember standing with them over the gorge, where the Genesee River seems perpetually to have only just moments ago broken through a dam. I remember thinking how close the past must have felt to my parents, standing there in the same place almost thirty years later, and how far away it must have felt, too, standing there with me, their 18-year-old daughter.
I don’t know if I thought this at the time. But I can imagine standing there in Western New York and thinking of a much smaller waterfall in the woods back home in Vermont — a waterfall
my dad had lifted me across on a hike because I was too small to make the leap. I can imagine thinking how that lift felt like just a moment ago — how in that moment ten years had slipped away; I had built a dam and watched the brook run through it; I had stopped counting street signs and let them slip away into the dark; I had lived and that boy had died.
Those ten years taught me the rules of holding back the sea:
1. The night is long.
2. Your finger in the dike is not going to be enough.
Now it’s the Grand River running beneath us — someone else’s Genesee, someone else’s Connecticut, someone else’s Chamberlain Brook.
The banks near the bridges here are reinforced with concrete, and the rapids for which the city is named are only a ripple of their former glory. We humans have done all we can to keep control.
Someone is swimming in the river, apparently unaware that it’s October. I think of a lifeguard friend of mine back in Vermont who did CPR alone on a drowning victim for 45 minutes before emergency services arrived to declare him dead.
I peer down at the river, where it plows up against the concrete before veering back into the stream and away, and think of her pushing, pushing, pushing.
The swimmer is not going anywhere, pulling just hard enough against the current to avoid being swept away.
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World’s End. 250 acres of coastline, forest and fields jutting out into the bay between Hingham and Hull. You and I, scrambling up from the rocky beach to the open fields, through an incline thick with trees, a bank still thawing out from the depths of January.
Here on this one piece of land, alive in the winter sunshine, surrounded by the sea and flanked by a coastline buried under the accoutrements of modern life. We race up the hill in the sun to look down upon it. Our legs ache and our hearts pound and the breeze tugs at everything, to the glory of God, in memory.
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Why is this piece your Trace Fossil?
“Sometimes you have to give an experience a long time to rest before you can write about it. You don't realize it, but you're waiting for more life to happen, to make sense of it. That was the case for me with this. This piece is what remains of my grappling with suffering, beauty and grace in an era when all around me seemed to be afflicted.”
Abigail Ham is a journalist and writer. She lives with her partner and their dog in Keene, New Hampshire. Her creative writing has appeared in Northwest Review, the Greensboro Review and other places.