Drive Taos to Santa Fe New Mexico. After the sharp peaks of Colorado, and the tall sharp Ponderosa pines, here we find the slightly rounder peaks of high desert, and the more rounded Juniper pines; everything dryer, more worn down; softer rocks? We find a cold spring by the Rio Grande while looking for a hot one. And as usual the clouds build up more cumulus in the afternoon.
Category Archives: Rivers
St Louis Valley
Driving down through Gunnison, Colorado, then through a small valley with creek and red rock walls, over Buffalo Pass and eventually into the wide St Louis Valley—a rift valley, like the ones we have flown over recently in Africa. We stop at a roadside hot springs and sit in the almost boiling water, and look out at the desert with mountains behind. We pass through towns like Moffat and Crestone; drive by some piles of clear white sand at the foothills to the mountains. And all the while I can feel the opening-up-ness of the valley, the water, its springs. Amidst the industrial junk and flatness, there is a life—a watery life—ripped open and springing up still. We pass on to the Rio Grade Gorge, with its bridge, beyond the Taos Earthships. Down down into the valley we look, and see that water—more water—flowing out, and down, and on. Mexico on.
Everglades
Apparently an everglade is a slow-moving river—very slow, but always moving. Apparently the Florida everglades start up in Orlando and slowly, very slowly, make their way down here towards Miami, splitting off on the one side towards the Atlantic coast, and the other side towards the gulf of Mexico. We take a boat ride. The guide says the levels used to be lower, before they dammed and sculpted the flowing water; says that dear and boar used to walk these shores. He takes the big-fanned boat through watery canals, and then right over the top of the sword-like grasses. He points out an island—something he won’t be going over—and says that first-nation people once used to live on islands such as these. He asks how we think they dealt with mosquitos; I can only think of fire. He also mentions mud. We see turtles, and fish, and birds, and alligators waiting in ‘holes’. These everglades used to be seen as a kind of dead land; now they’re seen as an ecological asset. I have a picture of them as a kind of lungs for the breathing of this part of the east coast. All that water slowly moving; all that water flowing out.
Cambridge Cold Front
Boston, Massachusetts: stratus, maybe cumulo-stratus when I first walk outside, looking up. It’s humid, warm, high 20s, little to no wind on the so-called Charles River. I walk along the water’s edge, all brown and slowly going, towards the Longfellow Bridge. I make my way gradually, pondering the slow pondering of rivers. Then, eventually, reaching a kind of narrowing of the path by a road’s edge, I turn back and see a large, black-grey cumulonimbus rolling over Cambridge from the north west. The wind whips in first, the air is cooler, dust blows up, trees begin to lose leaves and small branches. The rain is light at first, then larger drops. People begin to scurry; then they start running. I head back to a café near the hotel, rain beginning to increase; I go in, order at the counter, then turn to see torrential rain outside; lightening and thunder; people scurrying, running. Someone walks undeterred, drenched, without shoes. I sit by the window and watch, eating, waiting it out for about half an hour; lighter drops eventually. I begin to walk back. Some people are very wet. A small finch—or more likely what they call a house sparrow—appears under a curbside tree, hopping on his two little stick legs.
River Charles
Today, still a little sick, I take to the street and sun and walk out of the MIT area up towards Harvard. I try to find a centre for environmental humanities. Someone there tells me he just met a bunch of West Australians last week—a foundation I won’t mention. He redirects me to an empty entrance of a building; I take a brochure and walk down to the river Charles, where some 22 years earlier—half a life ago—I stood on a pedestrian bridge one Saturday night in September and watched a bustling 2002 world go passing, walking, sailing by; a kind of mirroring of life—the middle of which would be 33. And I look down on the river again now, reflecting; the bridge and river empty; the sun is warm, sharper than I can handle with illness, and higher than it was 22 years ago. I begin to head back, but not before cutting through some bushes down to the water’s edge. I throw in a handful of dirt and (re)introduce myself. I remember. It remembers. We remember.
Turtle Island
We walk the island at Hudson Crossing, upstate New York, with old friends and their family. At one point I go down to the river, causing me to fall back a bit from the group. And suddenly I’m struck by the love of the first people of this place, and the way they held something down here—a kind of double. I go on as I slowly catch everyone up, and come across, at the river’s edge, a turtle statue. Then on the bridge we are together again, and I look down and see, in the river below, an actual turtle…on the edge of this island—on this Turtle Island.
Moths, Butterflies, Dragonflies
Early June near Cold Springs on the banks of Mohicantuck / Hudson River, a warm day, no breeze, the water moving slowly glass. We step through the trails and grass and green of this New York, and everywhere we place our feet there springs more butterflies, moths and dragonflies.
Full Moon Humidity
How often do we see the full moon bring moisture, clouds, rain, humidity? This Friday night between the seasons of Djeran and Makuru, late June—no clouds, still and clear above, with the first stars shining through. We go up to the river, walk along it and, even though I knew it was there, I was struck by the actual sight of the top two-thirds of the big yellow moon sliding behind and up through the south-eastern horizon, a couple of spreading eucalypts in front of it, silhouetted. We were standing on a limestone hill looking over—the whole scene somehow so old and bony: moon, eucalypt, limestone cliffs layered up and crumbling away, the reflection on the water’s surface—a staircase, so they say, moving as we move; while all around us, nothing but warmth and moisture—drops already settling on cars and bricks—the air thick with it, in a way it not so often is here, without clouds…as if the equator continues its march, pushing south, pushing down.
Ngalkaning and Jerenkar
Ngalkaning (or nankeen if you can’t manage that) night heron all rufous and still in the evening by the river, perched above a pylon at the end of the water-police jetty. And slightly above him, on a bigger pylon, two janjarak silver gulls squawking and screaming at him to leave. They don’t fly or dive bomb, but merely screech down at him from a feet or two away, all flustered and inflamed. At one point the heron seems to point his beak a little more their way and then open it up, but his movements are so subtle it’s hard to really see, and maybe it was imagined. The gulls squawk and protest even louder, and the heron seems to return to his earlier position—one eye on the gulls, the other looking occasionally sideways at the river beneath. In any case, he seems poised—looking at his assailants, but also somewhere between them and whatever might be swimming below. One or two other herons glide by, letting out a throaty bark from time to time. It’s quite the raucous scene, and I consider going. But I watch a little longer—long enough to hear the gulls eventually lessen their accusations, and ultimately cease altogether. Then the silence (and the river passing). Then I go.
The Dying of the Trees
For the last few weeks I’ve been watching and hearing about the dying of the trees. Today I really noticed it most obviously after a few days being inside with illness. The dry time has continued into this season of first rains. And some trees haven’t made it. I hear of others, further from the city, but even here I’ve seen many peppermints—wanil—dry and baked and dead; many tuarts by the lake, other eucalypts. There are smaller shrubs by the river, acacias maybe (or were they cockie’s tongues?) that also haven’t made it, in addition to the dead casuarina’s poisoned for million dollar views.
And then at the lake today I thought, and surely it couldn’t be for the first time, of the dead tree stumps in the middle of the lake, dry and grey. They have been there as long as I’ve been visiting—a seemingly permanent fixture in the up-and-down movements of the water and birds from year to year. But for such trees to have once been here—eucalypts I guess, maleleucas maybe—this place would have once been much drier, for it’s in the centre of the lake that their skeletons rest. And they rest next to the straight edge of a fence line, protruding from the bed not quite as high. In the northern part of the lake the dead remains stand even higher, serving most recently as perch for the black shouldered kite. The northern ground is higher, dries out first, is covered in greener grass earlier, so it makes sense the trees were higher there—but even at the southern end they must not have been tiny; the ground must have been much drier, for no tree or bush grows there now, between the deepest centre, and the highest water periphery; only the back-and-forward movement of grasses breathing in the seasons, the rushes and reeds at the edges, then ground cover, going out to some shrubs and sedges and, on dryer land, eventually trees.
John Stubley 