botanizing

Creek Bubbles

A bubble slides over a lip of stone and down a flat trough in a sheet of water. Where rough stones lie across the creek, the water rumples, folding like drapery; here vortices of water must curve up from the bottom and twist around as they rise and fall back to the disheveled stones below because, here, the bubble becomes stationary, riding a round face of water.  The bubble is not still so much spinning in place.

I know the bubble spins when a string of smaller bubbles tumbles from the trough to be trapped in the vortex, where they curve round and inward, touching and cohering to the surface of the large bubble. The whole assemblage turns like a fast little planet with many moons.  The ease of this coherence, in a planetary dance, where little energy is needed to hold the whole together is simply a pleasure to watch.

Leaning over the creek edge from its sand margin, I see myself in the bubble. I am distorted slightly by the bubble’s curved surface.  Despite the spin of this mirror, my reflection remains stationary.  This miniature system reflects the Earth, whose rotational spin does not disturb my stationary seat at the creek margin.  The stillness of my image and body in these spinning worlds is, despite the rules of physics, momentarily amazing.  It is amazing especially because my tilt over the water for a best view of the bubble has a delicate equilibrium—I teeter between muscle strain and falling into the water.

Another big bubble slips over the stone lip and through the trough, it rolls over the rump of the cascade to the center of the whirlpool, causing the first big bubble to carom down creek. The delicate equilibrium on the face of the cascade is gone fast. The displaced bubble shoots over the surface of the duodenal water.  What had seemed secure, the bubble spinning, holding to the cascade despite the roil of the water, was easily shot. Little force was involved.

I try to recall lessons I should have learned well. Long ago in a freshman physics course taken during summer school, we experimented to understand vectors, velocities, and collisions—the rules of displacement.  A body’s place is tenuous.  A bubble, holding our image, can slip over the fleshy surface of water at the slightest provocation.  The rules of physics are filled with provocations.

*  *  *

I watched the bubbles in the creek that runs through Devil’s Canyon in west, central Colorado.  It was a day in April in 2006, when I was on sabbatical.  As I prepare for my field season in the canyon country of the Colorado Plateau, I have been thinking about my experiences in that landscape.

The Elegance of River Water

The Selway River swallowed an Ouzel as we arrived.  The bird slipped simply – I saw its twisting form dive head-first, its side turning up, then disappearing quickly – beneath the water, which revealed only a crease in its surface.  The eight-inch slit made by the Ouzel dissipated in the flow.  Is the elegance of river water in the flow – in its mannered folding, the flattening, and resumption of form?

We sat for lunch among the boulders and cobbles of flood plain.  When had I arrived, a rattlesnake buzzed under my steps.  The snake emerged from the stones to sit under a straggling shrub.  It watched us.  After lunch, I went to sit beside the river.  I watched the rifts in the flow – where the water had edges.  The edges had spines that rode the current like a snake.  Sinuous motion.  Shallow curves along the rifting edge led forward.  The edge moved, yet it had the stillness of the watching snake.

That shatter and clatter of falling gemstones in the breaking white water of rapids was not elegant.  It was exhilarating.  The awe of rapids was the force of the river.  Fast and confusing places, constricted, rumpled by stones from a side creek, they were a loud party.  Everything was for show.

The flat water had blue eyes.  Where the channel was wide, where a point bar calmed the current and opposite there were cedar and pine at the edge of the bank, the water was like a forehead, like broad cheek bones, like a face. When we looked into that face we saw its smooth contours.  Saw the ellipses of blue eyes.  Quiet gazes.

The water curved.  This was not a bend in the channel, not the natural S-form of a gently falling river.   I looked across the surface of the water.  It was bowed.   The water flowed like an exposed thigh.  It had that broad curve.  The light lay brightly on the skin of the water.  I reached out.

Metaphor

Lochsa Necklaces

As it washed over a stone, the necklace broke.  The pieces slid round the stone.  The ends of the braided chain swept outward around the curve of the rock and over the next cobble.  I reached for it, and, breaking the surface of the water, other necklaces broke, the delicate strands scattered.

They were only shadows.  I sat back on a boulder at the side the Lochsa River.  In this reach, the channel expanded, and the water fanned outward from a smooth surfaced central vein toward broader margins.  The water moving over shallow cobbles was braided into surface rivulets.  These textured braids made shadows of round baubles on chains against the stones.  As the water fanned, the baubled chains curved and, where the water eddied as the flow twisted and reflected near shore, the chains made rings, necklaces.

The strings broke over a near white stone.  I watched the pieces scatter and circle around then reform new necklaces, ends joined, black shadow baubles small and large in place. A back clasp closed just as I stood, thinking that I might reach again, while the black jewel string washed away.

The Astringency of Desire

“[T]he water of this river possesses a peculiar whiteness, being about the colour of a cup of tea with the admixture of a tablespoonful of milk,” wrote William Clark on 8 May 1805.  He and Meriwether Lewis named this white river Milk. They were more than a year into their expedition to explore the upper Missouri River and search for an overland route to the Pacific Ocean.  While the explorers may have had a store of tea, it is unlikely they had a spoonful of milk to lessen its astringency.  As I drive, I drink a cup of tea without milk and feel the astringent tug of the brown, tanniferous liquid against my cheeks.

The Milk River lies as much in the territory of desire as it does among the grasses of eastern Montana.  The territory of desire is a hollow where absence acts as an astringent that tugs at roots and leaves, the foliage of memory, wish, and imagination. 

What transpires between desire and its end, either in satisfaction or frustration, remains largely unstated in the memoirs and reports of explorers, who seldom write about emotions.  In the journals of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, memory and imagination are projected onto rivers through the names they apply.  They mapped the West, albeit subtly, as a territory of desire.  Milk, Clark wrote in the journal and on the map, but I see a memory of fullness, the roundness of tea with milk, as well as the astringency of desire, the tug left by the absence of that milk in his daily tea during the expedition.  At what distance, I wonder, does memory balance absence?

Beyond the already known Yellowstone River and the newly named Milk River, Lewis and Clark’s map became tenuous, more story and rumor than lines and relief.  The explorers began to map the empty space with desire.  After Milk River, the next three rivers were named for women.

*

East of the Rocky Mountains, I drive through terrain of rolling hillocks.  The ridges have the line of a woman’s hips and torso.  The shape of the land is inviting.  Inviting?  I invest the landscape with desire; I can imagine every valley an eye gazing with a ‘come hither’ look.  I’m driving to the middle of the three rivers that Lewis and Clark named for women—I want to see whether I can balance memory and desire at Judith River.

I drive through the sharp, pale ravines near Maria’s River.  “Inchanting,” Meriwether Lewis called this landscape.  A stiff wind out of the north buffets the truck as I drive.  The wind blew violently on the night of 2 June 1805 when Lewis and Clark reached a major fork in the Missouri.  Both forks were nearly the same size, and the explorers were unsure which was the ‘true’ Missouri.  Lewis took a party of men up the north fork, where he experienced “a most disagreeable and wrestless night” in the rain.  He returned to their camp on the Missouri convinced that the south fork led to the mountains and the Pacific and that the north fork merely traversed the plains before the mountains. Maria’s River Lewis named the north fork and explained it was “in honour of Miss Maria W__d.”  He wrote that “the hue of the waters of this turbulent and troubled stream but illy comport with the pure celestial virtues and amiable qualifications of that lovely fair one; but on the other hand it is a noble river . . .” 

Maria’s is a river of confusion.  Such is the consequence of desire—we allow turbulent imagination to turn a troubled stream into a lovely, fair one. The river is Maria’s—Lewis turned this river of confusion into a possession of the woman in his mind.  We can imagine this river as a gift—we can see Lewis after the expedition at the home of Maria Wood.  He carries a present for this lovely woman—at her doorstep, he hands Maria a river.

Maria’s River was the third of the three rivers that Lewis and Clark named for women after they went from the map to the territory of desire.  The first of the three rivers named for women, Lewis wrote, was “handsome.”  The explorers named it for the woman at hand; Lewis wrote on 20 May 1805 that they had called it “Sâh-câ-ger we-âh or bird woman’s River, after our interpreter the Snake woman.”  Lewis’s Sâh-câ-ger we-âh is virtually totemic; she is bird and snake as well as woman.  She gives the explorers voice when they need to communicate with local cultures.  She knows the plants to harvest for food.  In my road atlas, the Sacagawea  River lies like a loose thread on the map of Montana; I would like to tug it, to see the other threads that might unravel, to see what it would expose.

*

It’s a long drive to Judith River, but I want to walk this river. I want to understand how desire can make a river a woman.  At Big Sandy, I turn south.  The road is paved, and I drive fast, compelled by restlessness, but slow when the surface turns to gravel.  The gravel surface is badly potholed, as are my thoughts, which jolt from absence to longing to the depth of silence in a hole of distance.  When desire turns astringent, I think, it jars, offering only a rough road.

On a gentle hill, I go around a corner where Missouri River lies ahead.  I stop on the north bank, once the site of a ferry crossing known as Judith Landing, where there is a boat launch and broad parking lot.  There’s a tumbled-down building and an outhouse.  The campground to the west is filled with RVs and motorcycles.  Adults sit in lawn chairs in the shade of cottonwoods while children run about.  As campgrounds go, this is one of the least appealing that I’ve seen.  Lewis and Clark don’t mention camping here. 

I cross the bridge to the south side of the Missouri River, where I hope to walk to its confluence with Judith River.  The roadside and riverbank, however, are fenced by barbed wire.  A sign proclaims “PN Ranch and Game Preserve.”  No Trespassing.  History here has an exclusion zone.  What I would explore of desire at the confluence of the Missouri and Judith is frustrated.  I can’t even see Judith River.  A large alfalfa field, where irrigation pipes spray river water across the green crop, extends from the fence toward the Judith.  Where the Judith River must lie there is thin gallery of trees and shrubs.

It was still morning when the explorers arrived here on 29 May 1805.  They stopped for a river that met the Missouri from the south.  “I walked on shore and acended this river about a mile and a half in order to examine it,” Lewis wrote.  It was the clearest river they had seen, he claimed, and there were abundant bighorn sheep in the hills that lay off the river’s valley.  Clark walked much more of the river, going higher into the hills, which rise to a broad plateau.  Lewis tells us that Clark “thought it proper” to name this Judith River.

Proper.  I wonder what Clark felt as he walked the broad, flat bottom where the Judith meanders.  The curves of a river are the curves of a woman.  To walk those curves, to touch the swift spring water, must have elicited more than memory.  This river swishes and splushes; it is joyous.  Can I think that this joyous water was astringent, that it tugged at Clark, drew-in his cheeks, drew desire out of distance?

William Clark was 34 years old when he walked the meanders of the Judith.  Judith—Julia—Hancock was 13.  On his return from the expedition, William Clark married her.  Proper.

In the hills, I find a place where I can walk to Judith River.  There are clumps of aspen along the channel, which is lined by a cow path above the steeply cut bank.  The bank crumbles.  I spread my arms for balance.  My tenuous balance is insufficient for my memories, and I find that desire can’t make a river a woman.  What I understand by walking the Judith is the projection of the future—I can see William Clark looking wishfully, if desirously, ahead between meanders.  Rivers flow.  The Judith carries tufts of cottonwood fruits on the water.  The water, rounding stones and limbs, speaks.  Judith River doesn’t say what I want.  Clark, Clark, Clark, Clark.  I hear.  It’s another man’s river.

*   *   *
Notes

The quotes are from The Journals of Lewis and Clark edited by Bernard DeVoto (1953, 1997 reprint by Mariner Books).  I also used the Reuben Gold Thwaites edition of the Lewis and Clark Journals.

Desert Water

Desert water is a trickster, like coyote and raven but more subtle.  The tricks of desert water are those of apparition, voice, and texture.

In the wash of Devil’s Canyon, the water could be flesh; its pinkish tones are compatible and its texture is that of skin with pores and wrinkles.  The context of stone undermines the illusion.  Pinkish water against pinkish stone bespeaks sediment not skin. Sediment makes water a matrix of stone that dares us to rethink rock.

This water is sheer fabric; it folds and flows like a swished skirt; the rippled textile catches sun and our eyes.

As if a river

If a river were a goddess, then how would it be as a river? 

Meandering, I think, like a tale that begins effulgent but twists at hard stone to flow into dark places, cutting, revealing shadows edged by watery gloss on the rock, pooling in the broad, lit reaches, rippling at creek mouths, bar margins, and rough bottoms, and braided through a broad valley to end in a fertile delta.  It’s difficult to imagine a river that runs straight and narrow as a goddess. 

I like to think of the goddess in rivers in point bars.   The wonder of allure lies at those curves.  One can walk across the sand, which shushes, or cobbles, that clap at each step, to meet the goddess’s torso, just above the hips, where we might think of a sari exposing skin, where the curve changes directions, turning concave.

Saraswati is a goddess as a river, although she takes many forms and can be seen as a beautiful woman, who wears a white sari, riding upon a swan or sitting on a lotus flower.  Myths that give gods and goddesses the opportunity of many forms—through human form, as unknown beggar, a rival or object of desire, to inanimate forms—are the most delightful.  To take form as a river, however, is to be in constant transformation, an ideal state perhaps for gods and goddesses, although who am I, neither mythographer nor myth believer, to suggest an ideal state. 

When born first, assuming a human form, Saraswati emerged as a beautiful maiden from the mouth of Lord Brahma, the first of all beings.  Brahma himself transformed at the birth, becoming many-headed to better watch his alluring daughter. He gave her first the name Vak, meaning speech, and later Saraswati; he gave her also power to grant the power of speech to humans, especially to those who were well-learned, to whom she was allowed to give language that danced upon the tongue; Brahma then made her appear on Earth as if a river.

Every reach of river has many tongues.  There was an evening, when camped along the Raft River, that I heard two women walking down the marshy edge of the stream.  I heard their conversation and expected them to pass my camp.  Finally, I looked up- and downstream for them before recognizing their conversation was in the stream.  In the Lochsa River, I hear many voices; the conflux is turbulent, canceling the sense of any story, at least in April when I usually first arrive at the river for the season.  In the Deep Creek Mountains, camped along a creek, I read in the cottonwood shade, listening periodically to the water voices that flowed over my shoulders.

The story of a river is in its gravels and cobbles.  Those stones are the wash of time, relicts of weathering and flow.  They may have been carried from the beginning of the river or picked-up along its course; they can be held here or there, caged along the bank or lodged in the bed.  Is there a difference to a goddess between stones lodged and those discharged at the end?  As the mouth, I wonder whether a goddess borne of the mouth, a goddess for whom speech is a special power, gives greater significance to stones carried to the end.  Surely every stone discharged is like a story lost.  The voice, too, is in the stones, flowing from the movement of water around and jumping over stones.  Gravels and cobbles double the story, they are both history and its voice.  I like to think of cobbles and gravels as the stuff of Vedas.

Alluvium, the goddess says, alluvium, alluvium.   An incantation wills the suspension of belief. Particles of disbelief, suspended in the flow, as if mass defying gravity, rely solely on the power of the flow; the goddess is all physics.

 
 

[Acknowledgments:
The image above of Saraswati is from a painting by B. G. Sharma.
I have borrowed the image of the story of a river being in its gravels and cobbles from a statement by Dr. G. Richard in her course on rivers that the history of a river is in its gravels and cobbles.]

Nicht Gletscher Milch

What might have been pieces of a puzzle pulled apart caught my attention in the wash stream of Devil’s Canyon, but no sooner had I knelt to touch the fragmented sandstone than my gaze was diverted by gray vortices, winding at the water’s edge.  I followed the turbulent flow back to my foot, where its pressure had released slatey grit from under stones into the channel.  It looked, I thought, like Gletscher Milch, and my memory turned back to years when I watched steep mountain creeks, bankfull or more, often swallowing clumps of marsh marigolds, in the season of snowmelt run turbulent gray from the grinding effects of ice high in the mountains.  Aber hier, es ist nicht Gletscher Milch.  There are no glaciers at the headwaters of this sandstone canyon, although there remain small patches of snow.

Museum of Rivers

I have been thinking about rivers.  As a museum director, my thoughts turned to a museum of rivers that could show their beautiful forms, their mythic forms, and the forms of science that lie behind our knowledge of their histories and natural histories.  Museums rely on collections, the materials presented for display and study.  A museum of rivers must have more than photographs and graphs.  I began to wonder with my odd, awed imagination about the collection of rivers.  What methods would we use to collect rivers?  I think there would be a place for Mason jars.

Winter Camp Wash

In Arches National Park today I walked up Winter Camp Wash, which lies in a canyon below Delicate Arch.  The wash has a thick lining of tamarisk, and I initially skirted along the edge of a slickrock outcrop above the tamarisk boundary.  I weaved around the rabbitbrush, sagebrush, and clumps of dead, tumbled Russian thistle that clogged the gaps between shrubs.  Where the wash bent to the slickrock, bringing the tamarisk to the edge I walked, I climbed to avoid the thicket.

Tamarisk, an invasive introduced from the Old World, has proliferated along the drainages of the arid Southwest.  It forms dense thickets of woody stems in which fallen branches catch detritus to create a mid-shin thatch.  Maneuvering in these thickets is tough.

I climbed down from the slickrock and found a passage through the tamarisk to the wash, where I walked the margin of matted grass and mud.  Where the channel shifted and broad ice was available, I stepped from bank to frozen stream. The ice was sturdy, only rarely cracking and collapsing at my steps, and then only when I stepped close to the edge along the flowing water.  Where the ice crust was ruffled, the walking was easy, otherwise I slid or slipped along.  The ice was very smooth, although its surface rolled, along the base of a high, black-varnished cliff. For balance, I slid my hand along the cliff while shuffling my feet along the ice.  Another bend and the ice ended; I stepped from sand bar to bar then to impressionable mud at the margin. 

The channel narrowed and rose in quick steps—it was here only about a foot wide and filled with water.  I was forced into the tamarisk.  I wound to the outer margin of the thicket to walk along the edge of the slickrock then went up the rock. The canyon wall was shifting to vertical, and I climbed back to the wash but faced an obstacle:  a plunge pool below a drop-off where the canyon became a slot.  The rise of the drop-off was about four feet, which I could climb; however, the plunge pool had a diameter of about five feet and was filled with 12 to 18 inches of water.  Having cold, wet feet was not appealing today; so instead of wading through to shimmy up the slot, I backtracked to climb-out of the south side of canyon.  Perhaps, I thought, there would be another gentle slope leading back to the wash.  I walked the rim above the wash but instead of offering access back to the bottom of the canyon, the rock rose higher and higher on a vertical wall.   

I took a seat on the rock and thought about the middle of summer—the plunge pool would dry, and I would get into the upper parts of Winter Camp Wash.