I take a walk across the Birrarung Yarra River in Naarm Melbourne and eventually reach the Botanic Gardens. On the way I pass a fireplace on a hill overlooking the city, and a music bowl. At the garden there are many native and introduced plants and trees. There is an area of volcanic soil and plants on top of a hill in full sunlight. There’s an area nearby of paperdaisies and acacias. In the little valley at the centre, amongst water, is an area full of ferns and darkness. At the wetlands I find a bunch of familiar faces—magpies, butcherbirds, cockatoos, coots, moorhens, teals, swans, cormorants, egrets, black ducks, wood ducks, teals. And I learn from a sign that the Birrirung used to flow through here, until they redirected it closer to the city to manage flooding, attempting also to straighten its path: feeling here, too, from this other direction, Australia wrestling with its Indigenous and non-Indigenous stories and connections.
Category Archives: Rivers
Upper Swan Water and Trees
Drive out to Bells Rapids at the top of the Swan and walk up to where it becomes the Avon. The water levels are way up on last time, with actual rapids and improvised trails where the river has flooded the banks and walkways. The main water is brown, as are most side puddles, but there are also little streams that tickle down valleys from the side, at right angels to the river, with water more clear. And yet, there are still many dead trees right by the river’s bank—like kwell(ilul) the skeoak, with its shallow roots. I guess many didn’t make it through the long, dry summer, and stand now dead, in or near the water.
Water Falling Northern Bali
Water falls
in northern Bali
between plants.
Other Side of the Ridge
Up beyond the lakes of Bali—especially Beratan—there is a ridge line where you can look back down upon the lakes, or keep going down from there on the other side to the ocean on the north side beyond. It’s like the lip at the top of a crater. And here, on the north side of the ridge, there is water that still flows; from where exactly, I don’t know—on first glance it seems higher than the lake below. But it flows down none the less, through the narrow valleys in little rivulets and waterfalls. People use it to irrigate hydrangeas—they’re also growing bananas, coffee, pineapples, bamboo. And further down—on the slightly wider, flatter lands—they’re growing rice: the Subak system here, or so I’m told, too.
One island organism.
Shoes and Dolphins
Walking far today on a new pair of shoes, feeling them on every step—their differences from usualness, including an arch too high…I think I’ll take them back, Then, out of the corner of the eye, as if to remind me, four to five dolphins go passing by, with two younger ones jumping clear out of the water, sometimes landing on their backs.
The Flameless Fire
Hike up into the hills around the Lower Helena Reservoir. The Doomben—’weired’ further up; diversion ‘dammed’ here. I take the higher trails up and up until I’m on mountain bike tracks. There is rain, and washouts have formed through the gravel and clayey mud; elsewhere there is granite and quartz in places. The rain has come after the dry summer; but not soon enough for many plants—and not just smaller bushes but also parrot bush, sheoaks, and even eucalypts—many dead. Some trees look like the red of autumn northern hemisphere; others grey and lifeless. It’s like a fire has gone through, without the blackened burn marks; but a similar effects remain—a swathe of dead bushes and trees, though not so cleared— some of the signs of fire without the flame: The flameless fire of the long dry summer. (And I can’t help wondering if the land needs some of them gone—if not by fire then by thirst.)
Rivers Becoming
I take a walk today out where one river becomes another, both ways. I start at the Derbarl Yerrigan Swan River side and walk upstream, levels still pretty low somewhere near mid-winter flow. I follow it up the bank, northern side, hopping a granite rock or two; 10-o’clock flowers coming out, moorhens, galahs, shelducks, black ducks, egrets, herons, fantails, balgaz, tuarts, melaleucas, zamias, casuarinas; kangaroos at Walyunga—where it turns into the Guggleyar Avon—water bubbling, guggle-yarrin. Then I turn back around, following the water as it flows.
Noticing also, on the valley walls—especially south side—the many dead trees. It looks like the red and orange of northern hemisphere fall…though without a springtime coming.
Lower Salmon, Nimíipuu Country
We have just rafted the Salmon and Snake Rivers, Idaho, Nimíipuu Country. There may be too much to say: Bald eagles, big-horn sheep, hawks, osprey, a salmon, mother bear and cub bathing in the river, waterfalls flowing in, quick rapids, longer slower stretches, turkeys, pidgeon-like chukkers, rocky-grassy steep hills all around, scrubby bushes and ponderosa, sun and rain, killdeer (plovers), something like an avocet, starlings, robins, night hawks, bats, rising fish, alto and cumulus and cirrus, blackberries, magma rock columns vertical and horizontal, later sandstone, white sandy beaches each night we camp on, poison ivy and scraggly bushes. Five days. All pulled by on the arms of my cousin and his wife…and those of the river.
Arches
We drive the drives and walk some of the trails of Arches National Monument, Utah; the red-rock forms looking all watery—sculpted by water and wind—resembling the wet-sand castles you might make at a beach; many arch-like forms, the spaces beneath worn away. Close up, the sand is a fine, dusty red. In one spot—a kind of mini canoyn—we take our shoes off and feel it warm and soft between our toes, so dry. Later, we are staying in a hotel-motel in nearby Moab, the Colorado River flowing close by—a kind of marshy floodplain wetland to the west. And as soon as that sun sets, whole clouds of mosquitos come flooding in, ravenous—beings of too much life, too much wet…with the dry, side-by-side.
Pagosa Hot Springs
By the side of the San Juan River flowing cold and spring-summer-melt fast in Pagosa Springs, we walk past the nearby sulphurous foul-egg-smelling scents of the hot springs by the road and river’s edge. The hot, steaming water runs from out the side of the bank above the river, flowing from one shallow, hard-rock pool to another. There are about five pools, seemingly man-made or assisted, in which we sit with grey sediment and test the temperatures—the top one’s very hot, the next one not so bad, and then eventually a spot opens up in the ones right by the river’s edge where we can lean against the flat rocks and find a spot that feels just right, goldilocks-like, between the heat of the slowly-flowing spring, tricking in, and the cold, once-mountainous water of the river’s edge, with only a semi-porous wall of rocks between.
John Stubley 