Jake.

Jake is a 2nd Lieutenant in the U.S. Army, and is in his second tour in Iraq. I was never in the military, and never wanted to be, but he loves it. That’s good for him; it’s his life, after all. He asked me, when he found out that I was going to England, to go to Bath and get some good pictures for him. Why he was so fixated on Bath I don’t know – I didn’t ask and he didn’t tell me – and it wasn’t important anyway. Jake wants it, and if I can get it for him that’s all that matters. We’ve both always been that way.

In addition to the pictures, however, when I saw that people were leaving their coin offerings in the pools, I wanted to do that, too. I was standing by the low wall of the stone bridge over the first of the two pools. I looked around and noticed that the steamy waters had caused a fog to rise that completely obscured the way I had come – it was like the world ended about 15 feet back from where I was standing. While this added to my rising fears about being lost, I was glad of the isolation for what was a very private moment. I rummaged around in my pocket and found one of the few American coins I had left – a quarter. I noticed that by coincidence, it was dated the same as Jake’s and my birth year, 1979. I thought of Jake, standing so tall and strong and proud in his uniform, with an intense mental image of him, which we have both always been able to summon up whenever we wanted to contact each other. Then I thought of the Roman soldiers who had come to this place centuries ago for healing from their battle wounds – physical and mental. Even the ancient Druids knew Bath as a Place of Healing. I sort of mumbled something about “Whoever may still be here, please watch over and protect another brave soldier, far braver than me, as he does his duty now in a land far away from his home, just like you did then.” And I closed with what I hoped was proper Latin: “Ego te Salutamus.” And I flipped the coin high in the air over the steaming waters.

As it fell into the pool, it seemed that Time itself slowed down – the coin flipped so slowly that I saw it glint with each turn, and then it hit the water and continued down into the greenish murk, until it came to rest on the stone bottom, still gleaming faintly, with the American eagle just barely discernible. The thought came to me that the Romans had used the eagle as an Imperial symbol, too. By some trick of the light, it suddenly seemed to gleam brighter as I watched, and in fact, it was almost as if there was a shaft of light coming from the coin itself, cutting through the murky water and the fog above it like a laser beam. I shook my head to clear my vision, and looked to my left, back the way I had come. The fog was much closer now – I could only see about five feet along the bridge.