Seeing Rivers
Am I being hypnotized, enchanted, transfigured, turned to water myself as I watch, washed over and washed through by the colors and clarity, the lines of light?
Bicycling above the Middle Fork of the Yuba in the Sierra foothills last weekend I peered down from the high road clinging to precipitous cliffs into crystalline pools a thousand feet below. Even from this height I could discern the granite boulders on the river bottom. Their forms glimmered and their edges morphed in the lens of the river current as it flowed downstream. What was water and what was stone? All seemed to move and change.
My bicycle, like the water, flowed down the canyon and came to rest on the wooden planks of the hundred-year-old Tyler Foote Crossing bridge. I looked down and saw the river’s face dancing with light and motion. It’s an endless game to watch a river and try to really take in its constant newness. One is never done. Lines of big and little currents crisscross ceaselessly. Patterns repeat, yet never in quite the same way. How can the near eternity of a river be always fresh? One of nature’s astonishments is its insistence on originality, or at least variation, in every new slice of time. Nothing is ever quite what it just was.
It’s easy to name things: river, eddy, current, standing wave, boil, bend, rapid, river pool, wash, whirlpool, falls. But what sadness to name and then think I know them! What a poverty of perception to neatly label a category and box my observation inside it. Whatever I study is a great deal more than I see in that moment, but the more I look, the more the river delivers itself to me.
There is something mesmerizing at work. Am I being hypnotized, enchanted, transfigured, turned to water myself as I watch, washed over and washed through by the colors and clarity, the lines of light? If so, I don’t mind. I give myself over happily, as if to a dream. When I come back to time and logistics, I’m still myself, but I feel somehow better, clearer, cleaner, refreshed down deep. Something is new.
In the days that follow, the river still flows through my imagination, and something more: river remembering me as I remember river, and like the rocks seen from above, my edges blur and dance.
