Creek Running North

Willows fringed the river. Beaver slapped flat tail on water, made for the cutbank. You’d think she would have been accustomed to hikers. The little sandbar tied to the west bank of the Green was a popular launch for rafters. Perhaps it was some racial memory that drove her into the lagoon, paddling for the burrows in the wall of the bank.

Time’s arrow flies in one direction. She came from her ancestors who survived the trappers, a greater wariness bred in.

The riverward side of the bar was sculpted. Great broad arcs of sand scooped away as with a pastry knife, cut by flood and eddy, the sandy waste washed down into Split Mountain Gorge. I lay on the bank. Clear water flowed past a foot from my face. Beneath it, yellow sand in ripples. Black sand washed down from Wyoming filled the ripple’s troughs.

The river flows in one direction, but the black sand was too heavy to lift clean above the corrugated bottom. The grains bounced up a quarter inch, then dropped before the crests. They tumbled back downslope, upstream. The black lines in the hollows shifted, writhing, cursive sentences in a language no one knew. I tried to read them. They always shifted just as I was on the verge of comprehension.

I stood and walked to a point between two concave arcs. It was a prow of sand, a promontory, one of twelve evenly spaced along the bar, a foot above the water, eight feet apart. I pushed the point into the river with my foot, a cubic foot of sand dislodged.

A few seconds and the upstream point collapsed. And then the one beyond it. And the one beyond that.

Life flows in one direction only, but sometimes an eddy catches you. You pull toward the shore and back. Your life runs down the river while you watch. Sometimes in mid-river the past comes in, a trickle at first and then the flood.

Ten years ago I was on the river.

There is no present. A splash of a beaver’s tail. A rock in the current will make a hole downstream, the river flowing through it. The hole is the same shape, more or less. Not an atom of it is the same from one minute to the next. This life flows cold and green through us. We stay the same shape, more or less.

Water lays down gravel, stone by stone, and we dig for it.  Near my home are gravel mines by a river. A deepening quarry, or five, and the water breaks in. Filling the holes, the river quickens. It scours its bed back to the headwaters. Dig a hole downstream, and you deepen the river upstream. I dig holes now and wonder if the past will scour its bed.