Life these days has a curious lightness to it, a reprieve from worry. It is as if there is no longer anything to worry about, a palpable falsehood but there you have it.
I wake up, let the rabbit out. I chase the rabbit in and go to work. I come home and let the rabbit out. It darkens and I chase the rabbit in. A significant amount of my time is taken up with chasing rabbits these days, and I have learned from the experience. Sprinting is not a winning strategy, nor is assuming a set destination at any moment. I cannot outrun the rabbit, but I can outlast him, and I think now were I set out in the Mojave with a stick and knife I could keep myself well fed without breaking stride ever.
Were I eating mammals, I mean, which I am mainly not these days.
There are whales in the river again, humpbacks, and they have made it to the Port of Sacramento. How odd the fresh water must feel to them. How odd the sound must be in that confined current, the taste of Shasta snowmelt and Klamath rock. The authorities try to turn them back for their own good. There are too many careless knifeblade props in the water, too many who would try to jump the animals with their jet skis. Too many who would commune with them, as well. The last time this happened was a generation ago, and nothing worked to turn the whale around. He nosed up slough after muddy slough, ignoring all warnings, all entreaties, until they sang to him. They played humpback song on a boat-towed speaker, and he followed it back out through the Golden Gate.
The Sacramento is the nation’s largest unknown river. It rises in the sundew bogs of the Trinitys, the Jeffrey pine groves in the Warner Range, among the Sierran Big Trees, and all its arms, before the dams, ran cold and fast to the valley floor. There they gathered, a massive sea of snowmelt, and one braided, meandering channel to drain them into the delta’s skein of sloughs. On a flat plain a river travels more efficiently in meanders, and the Sacramento Valley is flat.
Five foot contour lines are separated by a quarter mile on Sacramento Valley topo maps, and they hint at the river’s history. Meanders form and deepen. They build goosenecks and then cut their throats, leaving oxbows. Tiny tributary creeks follow the old abandoned riverbeds, and then the inexorable river captures them again.
“Inexorable” — from a Latin word meaning unresponsive to persuasion — is not, I suppose, precisely the right word. One can persuade a river, at least for a time. One can channel the Newtonian Imperative, chain and riprap cutbanks, break levees into floodplains. But only briefly and then all our works will be occulted, odd rills and hollows overgrown with elder and grape and morel, incongruous rises and lakes on someday’s maps. All this will be lost and yet the river flows, and nothing to worry about any longer.
