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.
