botanizing

In Muddy Creek

“Quick sand!” yelled a woman behind me.

My ankles had disappeared.

We had traversed a willow thicket on a sand bench above Muddy Creek.  I had walked at the very edge of the bench in the gap between the willows and the drop to the creek.  Others in the group had wandered through the thicket, pushing willows away from their shoulders and eyes.

The bench ended at a bend in the creek, leaving us on the flat, sand and cobble margin of the creek.   Canyon wall stood at the bend, cutting off passage on our side of the creek, and Scott, the leader of our group, said, “This is where you’ll decide whether you want to get your shoes wet.”  

The water in the creek was only a few inches deep.  Although hardly formidable, no one likes to think about hiking for the rest of the day with wet feet.  Some in our group sat on the sand to remove their boots.  I looked at the array of stones that stood above the water in the creek and planned a route.  The creek here was about 20 feet across, and there were well positioned stones covering about 14 of those feet.  I stepped the stones across the stream, keeping water from my feet.  I placed my right foot on the last stone, while my left foot stood a stone about two feet back. I pushed my right foot against its stone—where I would need firm footing to propel myself from it to the edge of the creek.  The stone wobbled.  Worse even than the wobble, the soles of my hiking shoes had a mud cake.  Without the mud on my shoes, I’d brave the wobble and probably splash my left foot in the shallow edge of the creek just inches shy of the water’s margin.  With mud on my shoe, I’d likely slip on the right foot stone when I pushed-off and end up with both feet in the creek while splashing water all over myself.  Rather than make the attempt, I reversed myself, stepping from stone to stone back to the beach where the others still talked and some were removing their shoes.

Where the canyon wall met the bend in the creek, the water channel was narrower.  I saw my route over a shiny mud margin to a cobble field, where the surfaces of the stones stood slightly above the water.  The cobbles didn’t cover the entire span of the creek, but I could walk the cobbles, getting only a little splash of water along the bottoms of my shoes, and then easily take the remaining span of creek in one long step.

That’s exactly what I did.  Or meant to do.  And attempted.  The mud at the margin of the creek was slippery near the canyon wall.  My balance wobbled.  The mud stuck and came up with my steps, slowing my motion and shortening my steps.  My first step to the cobble bed came up short as I slipped, and my left foot went in to water.  Then my right foot went into water and my arms came up for balance.  That’s when I sank, and woman behind me yelled.  She warned others not to follow me as I struggled and sank quickly.

When steady, I pulled one foot from the reddish gray matrix and stepped for the middle of the creek.  With one foot planted in water, I then pulled the other foot from the sandy mud.  I was pleased that both feet came out easily and with the shoes still on my feet.  My feet then were not only wet but also muddy.  I swished one and then the other in the water to clear as much of the mud as possible.  I stepped across the creek to the bank and walked to the grassy bench above the channel.  My feet squished and water bubbled from the mesh of my uppers.  I had at least solved the dilemma of how to make the many additional crossings of the creek that lay ahead—I would simply wade through the water.

This water was milky.  I expect light colored turbidity early in the season when the flow is higher and faster.  It seemed unusual in the fall, especially in a season and earlier summer that had received little rain.  The water also smelled.  It was a metallic smell—the odor of heavy metals.  Selenium surely.  Maybe arsenic and mercury.  Perhaps uranium.  This was not a creek to drink.  Not far up river, near the start of our hike, was the site of an old mine—a major mine—and we could see the fans of stone debris from the mines on the cliffs.  Was that disruption, the loosening of stone, the long-term dishevelment of the soil crusts and disturbance of the creek banks a source of the water’s milk and its strong scent?  I waded across the creek again. 

Muddy Creek has an honest name.  Mud margins alternated with cobbles.  The mud varied from flat and shiny to complex sculpted or incised forms.  Water run-off through mud made a complex topography of miniature hills and valleys.  Yellow sunlight reflected from the curves of the little mud hills.  The mud was mostly reddish brown, although the hilltops, drier than the mud vales, were gray or even bluish in shadows when I squatted beside them.  Where it met canyon wall, the mud was rippled from waves of water reflected back from the stone.  Where it dried, the mud cracked.  I find a shallow pool of gray mud that has cracked like a tree to have a main trunk and a canopy of branches.

We walked perhaps a mile or two with others of the group, and then we had lunch on a grassy bench.  After the good conversations of lunch, the others turned back, and we continued down the canyon.  We walked over the bench, down to the beach, and along the creek until the way was blocked by canyon wall at a bend in the channel.  There we crossed the creek by wading through the water.  On the far side, we climbed from channel to bench and walked on.  This was repeated over and over.  Bench to beach, cross creek, and climb to the next bench.  Walking Muddy Creek had a rhythm.

As we walked toward the southeast, the canyon deepened.  The high walls left only a narrow band of sky.  These walls were sheered to flat facets and shined from years of weathering.  Where they caught sun, they were warmly yellow.  Many facets had a dark patina of desert varnish and looked like leather patches amid more freshly exposed red stone.  There were panels of striped varnish—bands of siennas, umbers, and pinks—that made a painterly scene.  Sections of wall appeared to consist of laid bricks—orderly rectangles stacked one above the other in rows with a mortared dip between them.  My favorite sections of wall—these curved like a torso from ribs to back that rises over buttocks—held water pockets—fields of rounded holes in the flesh colored stone.  We walked until the canyon walls shortened and began, it seemed, to transition to hills—still reddish orange sandstone, but the walls became round-topped mounds, each somewhat separate, at least in their upper half, from each other.

When we turned back to return to camp, I began to walk up the creek.   Although shallow—hardly covering my ankles—I was surprised at the drag of the flowing water against my steps.  My muscles pulled against the water.  Walking upstream in the creek was not the best route for our return.  I took one more step and went from shoe-top water to shin-deep water, but worse than the water depth, I sank again in the sandy mud—quick mud.  I sank fast nearly to my knees.  Both legs were mired.  The water lapped my thighs.  As I tried to lift one leg and then the other I could feel the mud hold my shoes.  When I tried to lift my left leg, my right one sank.  A classic quick sand situation—sink quick to an awkward depth and then every movement takes you deeper.  I rocked my right foot, trying to loosen the mud hold, trying to keep my shoe on my foot.  It would be a long, long walk back to our campsite without my shoes.  I spread my toes to hold the shoe and rocked my right foot, and then I pulled slowly.  My right leg came out of the mud, and I stretched to plant it out of the mud without knowing where I might find solid footing.  Water splashed, and I wrenched but remained standing.  I began to repeat the process of rocking my left foot, toes splayed to hold my shoe, but with my legs now spread, my entire body rocked.  Back and forth, holding balance as I could.  Then I lifted, slowly and steadily, my left leg and it rose out of the mud.  I stepped for cobbles in shallow water.  My legs and shoes were coated in gray, gritty mud.  I swept water in my hands to clean my legs and swished my shoes in the creek.  When I tried to walk, I found ridges of mud pushed against the bottoms of my feet in my shoes.  I took off my shoes to wash out the mud, but the grit merely shifted its shape, flowing along the inner cushion of my shoe, and as the water drained the mud held, leaving patches of grit on my soles.  

On the water

I am not easy on water, having never learned to swim, flunking even the lessons in floating that I had as a small child at the swimming pool in Ft. Madison.  The thought of being on water makes me apprehensive. 

As the boatmen finish rigging the gear on our rafts, the rest of us find life vests.  We don and attempt to fasten the vests, which are too tight or too loose.  We adjust for each other the various straps until each of us, taking a deep breath, is able to snap our plastic buckles in place, and, then, breathing out, we feel our chests and ribs constricted by the now snug vests.  Just before we board the rafts, the boatmen give us instructions on what to do if we are thrown in a rapid into the water and how they will rescue us.   I waddle toward my assigned raft.  I feel Frankensteinian—that is, like that man’s constructed monster—made of cast-off and miscast parts—my arms are propped outward acutely by the life vest, and both arms and legs are enclosed in hobbling layers of stiff, synthetic fabrics and raingear.

We motor down the cool morning river.  The first small rapid splashes us with cold water.  I shiver and wonder at the cold ahead.  We stop soon—only a mile or so from the put-in at Lee’s Ferry.  

This trip through the Grand Canyon with the National Park Service is to conduct vegetation surveys and make collections of plants.  Lori, one of our leaders, introduced us yesterday to the projects for the trip, which are centered on the invasive shrub known as tamarisk or salt cedar.  Tamarisk was introduced to North America from its native range in Eurasia and Africa in the 19^th century.  During the dust bowl years on the Great Plains, tamarisk were planted to create windbreaks to limit soil erosion.  Since then, tamarisk have spread to the rivers of the southwestern US, where they form thick bands along the edges of rivers and washes, out-competing native trees, such as cottonwoods, and changing dramatically the vegetation of riparian zones.  Tamarisk are common along the Colorado River, and they became especially prevalent in the Grand Canyon after the Glen Canyon Dam was built upriver.  The dam regulated water flow, eliminating seasonal flooding of riparian zones in the Grand Canyon, which allowed the proliferation of tamarisk and various other changes in canyon ecology.  Lori tells us that the Park Service has not attempted to manage tamarisk along the Colorado River, but they are working to control its spread in side canyons (see this link).  Our trip is devoted partly to surveys of side canyons where tamarisk has been removed to determine the consequences of the removal efforts—whether tamarisk or native vegetation is returning—and monitor for the spread of tamarisk. 

A second facet of our trip is to survey for the presence and spread of tamarisk beetles.  A few years ago, biologists in Utah began to experiment with a natural predator of tamarisk—a beetle (Diorhabda carinulata) that forages and reproduces only on tamarisk—as a means of controlling population spread of the invasive plant.  The tamarisk beetles have moved south from their release points and have settled on tamarisk populations in the Grand Canyon.  The Park Service is interested in studying the spread of the tamarisk beetles and whether they can help limit the tamarisk invasion.  Our crew has been armed with insect nets and instructed on sampling for tamarisk beetles and beetle eggs.  At our first stop along the river, a team from our rafts samples for beetles using the insect nets, which they sweep across the branches of the tamarisk.

My mission on this trip is to collect plants, and I am joined by colleagues, Wendy and Max.  Wendy has been studying the flora of the Grand Canyon for many years, and she knows intimately the place and the plants.  Max, too, knows the plants of the region exceptionally well.  While much of my research involves plants of the Colorado Plateau and more generally the intermountain western US, I do not know the flora of this region like Wendy and Max.  I feel like an amateur in the face of their floristic knowledge.  While Wendy and Max marvel at a sedge that grows near the water’s edge, I wander the gravelly bar.  I find a lovely Orobanche (broomrape), which Wendy tells me is unusual this far northeast in the Grand Canyon.  I find also a population of Cronquist’s blazing star (Mentzelia cronquistii).  The blazing stars are my reason for being here.  I have been studying the evolution of blazing stars for several years, and Wendy and I believe that we have discovered a new species of blazing star in the Grand Canyon.  This trip through the Grand Canyon will give us a chance to explore for additional populations of the new blazing star and give me the opportunity to sample the diversity of the various mentzelias that are here.

We stop next at Cathedral Wash, where Apache’s plume and prince’s plume are in bloom, and a hackberry in bright leaf has fruits.  As the day edges onward, our stops to survey for tamarisk beetles become quicker, and there is little time to botanize.

The raft moves calmly on smooth water.  I grow comfortable with the boat and the water.  We are quiet in the afternoon, after shade descends on the channel.   The shaded river has a wiggly blue path at midstream where sky and water, in a way, meet.   Our course down the blue path is bordered by deep, rufous browns and viridian.   Where the river manages a reflection of a sunlit cliff face, the water shimmers with orange. 

We enter evening with a series of rapids.  I grab a firm hold on a rope that secures our gear (and hopefully me).  Each rapid begins with rolling arcs of shiny water—I am enamoured by the curve of water, and I would stay here on the rapid’s tongue where the water bends and shines like metal—and then we plunge into the holes where white, shattered water curves high, rising over the front of the raft, and back at us.  The frigid splatter hits like shots, and we twist away, recoiling tensely, at each strike.

In the mid day heat, I had taken off my rain gear, allowing the rest of my clothes to become soaked.  In late afternoon, when shade descended on the river, I grew cold and put on again my rain gear, which served to keep the cool air and chilling spray of water away from my skin, but the rain gear held a clammy cold from the wet clothes tightly against me.  Is this a pleasure?—I wonder to myself.  I am anxious to reach camp.

*

Sun shines on our camp.  When we arrive the rafts must first be unloaded.  We then receive instructions on how to set-up the kitchen and toilet.  I shiver through the instructions—my shoulders are tensed against my chill, and I can hardly move in my drenched, cold clothing.  When we are released, I take my gear to a pair of large boulders that will serve as the head of my bed for the night.  Fleece pants, a dry, cotton shirt, and a fleece pullover are readily at hand in my pack, and I walk upslope behind the boulders to change clothes among the shrubs.  In dry clothes, I warm quickly, and the pleasure of the place returns.

[this essay dates to 2 May]

The River's Water

We are camped on a point bar that has no point; instead, it curves broadly along the margin of the Selway River in the arch of a bow.  At the down-river end of the point bar, there is a large boulder and pools of water that have been caught in dips of sand.  Up-river, the end of the point bar is edged by the mouth of Renshaw Creek, where a willow thicket along the creek gives way gradually to a cobble field in which river water spreads and curls. 

In some past time Renshaw Creek spat boulders from its mouth, resulting in a rapid on the Selway River.  I wonder at the timing of the rapid’s origin.  Did those boulders tumble from the shoulders of Fog Mountain, where Renshaw Creek rises in two branches, in one tumultuous event—a canyon cutting, boulder bouncing flood—perhaps at the beginning of the creek itself—or have they arrived more slowly over many floods and longer time?  Gentle Renshaw Creek offers in this season little more than clear and cold water at its shallow mouth, but during the spring snow melt its rush will be furious, white and splattering, with thick streams and muddy folds that slap at the bank edges with great erosive force.   Do those spring melts bring regular runs of boulders? 

I can see less than half a mile of the Selway’s channel when I look downriver.  Beyond the end of our point bar, the river curves to the north, then south, and north again before it seems to end in shadows of forest.  A band of shiny water extends from the downriver end of the point bar into a dark, flat pool.  The surface of the pool offers reflections of the forest.  On the far side of the river, I can see reflections of the individual conifers, which are yellowish green in the warm, evening light, but on the near side the reflection is simply the dark, shadowy face of the forest.  Beyond the near flat pool, where the river turns south, the surface of the water reflects a bright silvery white light. 

As I walked upriver earlier in the day, I watched the beadlike strings of reflections that rode the edges of ripples, where the surface of the river had been disrupted.  I watched the passages of those ripples.  Some ran like strings for yards along the channel and others curved toward the shore in concentrically lit arcs. 

From the point bar at Renshaw Creek, I watch light on the water that is pushed toward shore.  This shore water scrunches into waves as it rides laterally from the cobble channel bottom up the sandy shallows at the point bar’s edge.  The smooth arcs of these waves fragment into diamonds and runs of light ridges that wiggle to shore.  In the early evening, the diamonds anastomose and shoot toward shore sinuous lines of yellow light.

In the early morning, when the light is strong but the sun remains beyond hills to the east, I return to the mouth of Renshaw Creek to filter water.  Where water from the creek meets the river, strong stream bands curve from the edge of the current toward the point bar.  As these bands approach the shallows they break into arcs and then further fragment into amoeboid forms.  The faces of the watery amoebae flip forth and back, north and south, flashing blue and then black as they reflect sky and shadowy forest. 

I return from the river to the campfire.  My companions have boiled a pot of Selway water and offer me a cup for tea.  The river water, which looks so often the color of tea, is clear as it pours from an old, charcoal-covered coffee pot—but when it enters my cup, infusing the tea, it returns to the color of the river, a rich, dark brown.  I drink the river, its color and all.

Up the river with Ray

After we rise in the morning, I fix tea water and a breakfast of eggs and sausage for everyone.  We clean-up the campsite, and disperse to prepare our packs for a walk up the Selway River.  Ray, as he walks down the hill from the campground’s pit toilet, announces, “I read a poem by W. S. Merwin while on the privy.”  Debbie laughs.  “Ray,” I say, “that sounds like the first lines of a poem.”   

Soon, Ray shoulders his pack, grabs his pole, and walks to the trailhead.  A few minutes later, Debbie and Peter depart.  Adrian and I continue to pack and, then, we also shoulder our backpacks to walk up the river.  We walk for nearly three hours and go a little more than three miles.  

Debbie, Peter, and Ray lie on a point bar, where they bask in the hot afternoon sun after a swim in the chilly Selway, when Adrian and I arrive.  We chat through the remainder of the afternoon about the poems of William Stafford, Theodore Roethke, and Inger Christensen.  

Ray says, “Ouzels sound to me like change jangling in your pocket.”  Soon, as he sits with his back to the river, we hear the jangling call of a bird as it flies upriver.  Ray swiftly tilts his head to catch the call.  “Hear that?” he says, “It’s an ouzel.”  We always enjoy the ouzels on the Selway.  We’ve watched them dive from boulders to water at some campsites.  At other sites, we have waited pensively for those dives when the ouzels were contented simply to do knee-bends on riverside stones.  I wait, too, for Ray to write a jangling poem about the behaviors of ouzels as he has done for salmon and wolverines.  

As the afternoon becomes evening, we gather firewood, and Ray starts a fire on the point bar that will be our campsite.  We reconnoiter spots around the fire—expecting the wind to go either up river or down—and put our sleeping pads on the sand around the fire where we hope that smoke will not go.  

In the darkness, Ray reads aloud from the collected poems of Theodore Roethke.  He asks the rest of us to each read a stanza of Roethke’s poem “The Rose” and, by the light of our headlamps, we read.  Debbie begins:  “There are those to whom place is unimportant, / But this place, where sea and fresh water meet, / Is important . . .”  

This place, the Selway River, is important.  By walking this river over the years we have built of steps our history in this place.  Point bars have become the places of stories.  The river’s flow, its sinuous channel, and its rippled reflections of light have become poems.  

When we finish reading Roethke’s “The Rose,” accompanied by the rush of the river and the chirruping of tree frogs, we leave the fire to head to our tents for the night.  I think about this line from Roethke’s poem: “It is here that the poet claims to find his true self.”  I am not a poet, and I am uncertain about true selves, but many claims reside here for me.  I find on the Selway River solace, calm, and beauty as well as good friends, Ray’s stories, and nights of poetry.

* * *

The photograph of the group around the fire was taken by Adrian.

To the Selway

It is about 3.00 in the afternoon when we leave town on a beautiful, warm day.  The sky is blue and clear.  The wheat has been harvested, and the hills, which are now ochre-colored, look like closely shorn heads.  We drive off the plateau and down the valley of the Clearwater River, which we follow upstream bend after bend on Highway 12.  In Kamiah, Idaho, we stop for tea and discover that the dog has vomited in the back of the truck.  The dog, Astra, always vomits when I drive, which tends to be on long trips, often on curving roads into the mountains.

Above Kooskia, Idaho, traveling now upstream along the middle fork of the Clearwater River, we pass through the ecotone between steppe and forest.   The steppe vegetation of the dry slopes consists most prominently of grasses and shrubs.  The grasses have dried.  Leaves of the shrubs are yellowing.  Beyond the ecotone, the forest consists of conifers.  These are mostly ponderosa pine at the lower end.  As we drive up the river, the houses become fewer, and the forest gets closer to the margin of the road.

At the mouth of the Selway, which is broad and has shoals with clumps of willows, we turn south to drive up this river.  There are a few houses along the lower part of the Selway, but these soon end and so does the pavement.  The remaining road in this season is badly potholed.  It slows one to the pace of gazing at flowers on the cliff to the left and the river on the right.

The river runs in bends between the hills.  It runs around white stones and squeezes between gray boulders.  The river is broad and dark but squiggled with blue lines.  It slides flat around point bars to chatter and sputter spumes of white over rapids where creeks open.

The sun is still above the hills but the light is late when we arrive at the end of the road.  Our friend Ray is already at the campsite—at least his truck with a canoe on top and bicycle on the back is parked at the campsite where a small fire burns.  We turn to look around, and Ray emerges from the woods carrying wood in both hands.  I have brought firewood from home I tell him, and it will be enough for the night.  We get our chairs from the truck to sit beside the fire.  The evening darkens and cools.  We have tea.  Our friends Debbie and Peter arrive, and we all sit around the fire talking about novels and poems.  The Selway slides behind us.  We hear it wash and clatter.  We talk about other days and nights on this river.

Ray looks up to the sky, where he points out the constellation Cygnus—a swan in the sky’s river of stars.  As we watch, a bright satellite moves across Cygnus.  The movement of artificial satellites is too much to consider.  We leave the fire, the night, and the satellites for our sleeping bags.

In Selway sun

Shadows of the current are blue.  Waters of the slowed river spread toward shore, pushed out like particles of waves, arched from the current’s stream but with a face bent cucullately toward me.  The lips of these little waves, as they sweep toward me, are white-edged and shine with sun dots.  I watch the waves break on a stone shaped like a pregnant belly.   The water rushes around the round stone margin, slipping fast like a sheet shook over a bed over the round stone top, where the water wrinkles and ceases, a thin fold of white froth dissipates.  The sheet pulls back from the stone, sliding over its edge, and the water dips down as if the river had drawn it back.  I hear the river inhale, a wet, slippery ‘uuurrrgh.’  The next blue-faced wave comes.

When I crawled from the back of my truck at 8 a.m., after the sun had risen upriver, I fixed a large cup of lapsang souchong tea, which I carried down the slope, along with a my canvas chair and Paul Fussell’s Abroad, to the edge of the Selway River.  A large, flat-topped boulder provides a perch in the sun, where I watch the river.

There are yellow nets on the submerged brown stones.  The thick, yellow cords move with the waves, which flex the nets.  I realize the yellow networks are the edges of waves.  The sun does not cast the waves as shadows on the submerged stones; instead, the thickened edges of waves act as lenses that throw the sunlight in hard beams against the rock.

The sun rises higher over the ridge opposite the river.  I take off my sweater and sandals.  Insects swarm, like yellow particles, in the light over the river.  Their motion is almost Brownian.  A particle insect drifts up then darts down.  The swarm weaves.  From my seat, it looks as if a plane of insects moves upriver while another plane moves down—each moving plane seems to curve back at the edge of the swarm to go the opposite direction.  The illusory tapestry is a warp of perspective—from my seat, I see the up- and down-river motions of the insects and sense that those moving in a common direction move together in a plane, whereas they are likely to be widespread in the swarm with the up- and down-river insects intermixed.  My fixed perspective allows my illusions. 

No 'Damned' Memories: The Nooksack River

Memories are surreptitious.  Like the Nooksack River, which hides under maples and cedars, memories run fast in leafy shadows. 

The highway flickers.  We have driven east past Deming and into the foothills, where big leaf maples crowd the road.  The leaves of this maple, which are larger than my hand, stand folded, like the gable of a house, one side yellow in the sun and the other blue in the shade.  What light slips past the maple canopy has hard shadows.  Yellow ovals of light fenestrate the darkly shaded highway.  I close my eyes against the flickering light as we drive.

The folded maple leaves remain solarized on my closed eyelids.  With my eyes closed, memory wells and quickly flickers no less than the light on the highway.  The morning’s scenes flip past, and the maples themselves emerge hung in a yellow mossy fur that is dotted with epiphytic ferns.  The morning’s maples merge with my first and other experiences with big leaf maples, making a kind of botanical collection of memories.

The Nooksack River is here, hiding among the hills. I am curious about the Nooksack and want to experience the river, want to walk on point bars, flip stones, and scoop river water into the palm of my hand.  I look forward to memories of the Nooksack.

Views of the river are fleet at bridges and the few breaks in forest where the channel is near the highway.  I sense the river’s shallowness and a glacial source in fast views of flat water with stone ripples and a flatter gray green color.  When I can’t see the river, I sense its channel at a hill’s edge.

The hills are high and steep.  Our highway meanders like the river around their ends.  We drive in a flat-bottomed valley, accumulated surely through centuries of floods.  Christmas tree farms tuck against the slopes.  The trees are trimmed into tight cones.  The hills, too, have been trimmed.  There are scars of clearcuts among patches of second growth forest.  Houses, both ramshackle and well kept, sit along the highway.   Logging trucks park at some.  Signs that proclaim support from the timber economy are tacked on frail sheds.  There are empty houses partly reclaimed by shrubs and young trees in this lush, wet place.  We see more horses than people and assume the horse economy to be robust.  At the Equine Breeding Clinic, young colts romp in pasture.  Up the road at Black Mountain Ranch, horses in paddock have their leisure.  Further on, a young girl paces her horse among red barrels in a farm’s dirt enclosure. 

“Flat scattered farms in the bends of the Nooksack” is how Gary Snyder described the place in his poem “Nooksack Valley,” which he dated February 1956.  Snyder was situated “In a berry-pickers cabin/At the edge of a wide muddy field/Stretching to the woods and cloudy mountains,/Feeding the stove all afternoon with cedar” when his mind came to a stand-still.  The smell of the cabin brought the memory of a childhood farmhouse and brought his 25 years awake in

                  damned memories,
Whole wasted theories, failures and worse success,
Schools, girls, deals, try to get in
To make this poem a froth, a pity,
A dead fiddle for lost good jobs.

The young man’s memories get mixed-up with expectation.  Snyder slips the memories and the place with salmonid drive:

     Steelhead run now
    a week and I go back
Down 99, through towns, to San Francisco
                and Japan.

Memory enjoins motion.  There are thick, sludgy memories like wide, deep rivers that are impossible to wade, and we turn back from them to walk away.  Other memories may be logjams, impounding our motion but building pressure, and, finally, we jump the banks to take a new course. How often has each of us wanted to remake ourselves in a new place?  The enjambment in Snyder’s poem has the effect of logjammed memory—held-up in the moist cabin, his memories build-up, causing him to back-up along old paths before adopting a new course. 

The old Nooksack River was like a metamorphic god, a shape-shifter. Its channel once slithered easily across its floodplain, but berms now contain the river against the loss of property.  Near its mouth, logjams would impound the river, building a lake and the pressure to flow, and the hold would be temporary.  Breaking the logjam could open new channels, and the Nooksack has moved its mouth from north to south, going from Lummi Bay and to Bellingham Bay.  The new channel opened old wetlands, creating a new delta to spit logs into the southern bay.   The old Lummi delta became wetland, overgrown with rushes, like a memory distilled from the rush of life, where the river no longer flows. 

The Nooksack is quick to the sea.  From the tips of any of its three tails, falling 4500 feet from glacial cirques, it runs to the sea in less than 75 miles.  We follow the north fork, a tail that curves north and slips up into the North Cascade Mountains.  The tail tip of the north fork turns south and lies cold against glaciers on the north face of Mount Shuksan.   I can see the mountain when I walk on a plain below the peak to the edge of the river.  The cobble bars at the river’s edge are light and bright and, when I step from the forest, I feel the frontal strike of heat reflected from the stones.

The milky river is also stone.  The cold water pours gray from the palm of my hand.  The turbidity comes not just from the fast water of snowmelt but also from the grinding of the glaciers and the sliding of snowfields on the slopes of Shuksan. The palest green of the river’s water is the finest stone, ground from the mountain and now suspended in the current.  In the shallows, the river’s stone bed has magenta edges in brown water.  It is only in the shadows, where the slow pools are overhung by forest and in the main channel where the current creases, that the river seems watery enough to be blue.

What I dislike about memory is the expectation it builds.  Memories like the purity of pleasure, the dredge-like drag of regret, and the blueness of water lead us astray.  Memory can ruin a river, although I doubt I shall ever forget the light pale loveliness of the Nooksack’s green water and cerulean shadows.

We stop where the Nooksack falls fast—dropping six feet in a reach of 50 feet—and the narrow channel of the river is contained in old forest.  The forest feels as wet as the river.  Fallen trees are soft as sponges; their barkless wood is slippery.  The standing trees encased in moss have lineaments of dangling lichens.

Trees fall into the river channel and not all of the fallen have drifted to the river’s mouth.  The trunks of thick cedars, some with crowns of root stumps, rest clumped high on the bars at the forest margin.  I wonder how far a cedar trunk, two or three times as long as the width of this mountain reach, moves when it falls into the river at fast, high flood.  The violence of cedar trunks banging boulders and shooting cataracts is unimaginable, especially when I rub my hand over the weathered trunks that lie, silent and gray, supported at river’s edge on boulders.  These rough, drifted trunks are the driest objects of the river’s forest.

Fallen alders hang, pointing downstream, over the channel.  These slim alders are topless, denuded of all branches, and partly stripped of bark.  Unlike the gray trunks of drift cedars, these alders have freshly fallen this season, and their exposed wood is as ruddy as warm, live flesh. Crouched with my back against the slant of a boulder, the fleshy alder stabs like a premonition, a twisted memory construed forward.  I look behind me.  There is nothing bad—only teacups and a few of my wishes strewn about the stones. 

Nothing changes as much as a river.  Walk a river and every mile is different.  Slumped on a Nooksack boulder, I watch the river strike a stone and spray. A run of memory splatters.  Water tumbles in foam.  Sheets coalesce, more resilient than memory, slide and divide as the water slips over the side of the stone.  The waters run together too much like memories.  How will I remember the Nooksack?  Reach for a memory and it changes like a river.

*  *  *
I thank Pete McGregor for calling my attention to Gary Snyder’s poem “Nooksack River,” which I have used to develop this sketch.

“Nooksack River” by Gary Snyder was published in Riprap, & Cold Mountain Poems (1965, Four Seasons Foundation).

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