2.16.13       Riverlove

Office locked, work bags relegated to the car, I quickly rush through the mist laden parking lot of late afternoon, the sun impassive behind a thick wintry sky.

Tall mounds of plowed snow line the edges of  pavement; I begin to  clamber over , snow up to thighs;  I trudge, single-minded, to the very top, where finally an unobscured view of the rushing river lies below.

Here is the silence of  Thursday evening, not a human in sight. As I climb closer to the river, the air resounds with the crashing of small time Massachusetts ice floes, barreling down the waters, breakneck speed, smashing into this river bend, piling up like so many enormous beings, haphazard, one after the other, appendages flying, contravening into some irrepressible contusion.  They are one  to two feet thick, eight or ten feet across, glistening blue/grey/white, a startling and resplendent glow in the sunset, their iridescence heartstopping, as the frozen shapes continue round the bend from upstream and outwater areas of the Connecticut.

Hatfield, Sunderland, The Bashan, streaming round the glacial protrusion of Mount Toby, through old and small town friend Montague, and up up coursing beneath The French King Bridge, a cantilever arch creation from 1932, where an ominously wealthy (for this area) land owner traveled one day to pitch himself over the edge, (a multifarious  contemplation, the arrival, the perch, the push off, the disastrous landing…) leaving behind a life of land acquisition, a wife now dead and gone, a legendary capacity for poker, scotch, the profane, and finally a dramatic flight from quickly approaching cantankerous age and solitary illness.

Yet here, today, the downstream river crooks and twists, oxbows at times, and then continues it inexorable hastening  ultimately to the endless, length-less, breadth-less, seemingly age-less Atlantic.

Here, we have the evening song of the sloshing waters ,an aged river in winter, as two exotic Ring Neck Ducks, with their stark and elegant black and white edges, silently surprise, then sweep upstream, flying scarcely above the wild waters, on their way to wherever home may be.

Our eyes drawn to the cloudcover above, where  the hundred local adolescent Crows journey, their passing staggered, as the continuous stream of young ones play and romp and toss their agile selves about, crying and hooting, heading for their well hidden roosting grounds, their involvement in this annual occurrence innocent of the fact that every summer's batch of young crow before them have gathered and played, fed and then slept together , in this way, in this area, for countless years. 

Here, my own feet grow numb, having found my way down the decrepit and long forgotten stairway to the small strip of riverfront below the parking lot, hidden,   the earth cluttered with brush and tree and limb thrown up upon the land as the river, time and again, rages and rises, tosses that which it captures and carries afoul, and then inexorably the waters settle once again.

Here, I continue to stand, reluctant to interrupt the leaning out toward the waters, the glimpses of elusive, adaptive fish just below the surface, living their own unimaginable lives, all of us immersed in the February cold for one more year.

The late afternoon sun streams it’s last farewell for the day, earth magnificently turning, unrepentant, as humans and wildlife alike all fall toward night.