Protozoa
We hiked the trail backwards. We were always conducting ourselves that way, my notwife Montgomery and me. The backcountry campsites in Fundy National Park are situated so that you muscle through the rigorous parts of the trail (the chasms and ridges that fall and rise in switchbacks) when enthusiasm is high and the aches haven’t yet set in. Going backwards we crashed into mountain trails already crabby. We forded three rivers before we reached the pond in the middle of a farreaching meadow. Our socks were still wet on the second morning.
Some earthly places are so extraordinary they can’t be natural—the Bay of Fundy is one of them. By some formation of the seafloor (or more likely a mystic weightening of the moon in the Canada sky) the tides advance and retreat with more force than all the rivers on Earth. Water runs out as far as a half mile and fog skims in from faraway to make up the vacated space. Montgomery was a Pisces too. Her heart played with all the moon’s toys. She read on the internet about the tides of Fundy so we planned an adventure.
Periodically active people of youth shouldn’t have a problem hiking the backcountry. For those who find the hills too strenuous the first day’s hike terminates on a car camping site from which a taxi out costs less than twenty. But we arrived at Point Wolfe after four days of ridges and salmon pools. We hadn’t even seen the bay. I had overpacked our packs and Montgomery went bowlegged under the weight.
It started raining overnight. Montgomery told me she had decided to leave our home in the city. Drops wormed their way onto our pillows through the tent’s seams.
Our packs hanging from a distant tree limb had soaked through before we noticed. I spread our things out in the recreation room alone while Montgomery lay out in the tent. Despite how cold it had been—cold enough to send the shakes up my arms—rain drummed down an attic’s musty heat. I pissed into a puddle and a family walked past. I waved and called the girls sweetie. I was feeling real funny. Maybe I was sick already.
When our clothes were nearly dry I went back to the tent. Montgomery didn’t know where I’d been. Her cheeks were puffy and so were mine. We kissed sweatily. Her collarbone showed bruises beneath her crewneck but we had to get ready to go.
In our backwards route the cliffs were the last day’s hike. There was no room to talk crawling up the crags behind the campground’s covered bridge. The changing atmosphere patted down mist between the trees. Montgomery wasn’t the type to drag the lake. She wanted to press on but I lingered on signs nailed into tree trunks. Ghostly barks of white and yellow birches (Betula papyrifera, alleghaniensis) emerged like needles from the fog. The bedrock comprised strata from the Proterozoic which imprecisely translates to “early life” but literally denotes the emergence of multicellular organisms not yet visible to the naked eye. Of course no naked eye yet existed. Pebbles from 2500 million years ago rattled in the bottom of my shoes. The following Paleozoic era evidences the earliest forms of life with visible shells. Montgomery and I had been together for five long years—eons in the scale of my own early life, long as the transition from Proterozoic to Paleozoic. We had time to spin shells around each another. Every minute in silence we lived 100 million years. More than 500 times the span of humanity. As we climbed those cliffs from water level into aether we climbed the strata of time.
What I’m saying is I took off my pants. I would have taken it all off, naked as those first who came, but the packs needed our ponchos. We reached the first lookout at low tide. Rain fuzzed the horizon so my eyes showed a gradient from grey to grey that the brain struggled to make meaning from. The wind blew me off balance. Slippery stones shifted beneath my feet. But Montgomery held me by my backpack and anchored us to a beech tree.
Low tide stretches so far away that the ocean disappears into sand. Earth merges with sky. Battered by the wind, we cackled like flags. Only once the waters of love had receded into our protozoan past could we feel what rode in with the fog—joy.
Josh Boardman is from Michigan. He is the author of the chapbooks Colossal (2025), Plantain (West Vine Press, 2018), and the Latin translation project We, Romans (2015). His work was shortlisted in the 2025 Leopold Bloom Prize for Innovative Narration, selected as a finalist in the 2024 Fugue Prose Prize, and his stories have appeared in journals such as Zona Motel, New York Tyrant, and Dandruff Magazine. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, where he is working on his second novel and a collection of stories about his hometown.