water

i spent the whole of today on the upper part of the clackamas river, whose crystaline green waters come right off mt. hood and whose banks are populated by the most enchanting old growth forests and fauna. though the river is flanked almost the entire stretch by road, down on the water, it is an archetypal experience with the element. one can see for meters into the water, the clear, distorted rippling images of boulders lying gently on the bottom of the river, or a single green aspen leaf being nestled along in the lower currents. i love the way it sounds when you dip a paddle into it and when the bubbles return finally to the surface after being pulled out of the air at the front of a big standing wave. we paddled 12 miles down it today and navigated several class four rapids and many many class three. only once did i really contend with the river: going into a big hole and fighting out to be flipped over and over by the roiling ropes of currents spindling off the hole. at my fifth roll up, gasping for air, i was out and looking back at the froth. feeling the water under your body in the kayak’s shell and the brute intense power of it is reminder of the vigerous veins pulsing across the surface of our earth. environments like this are so good for our psyches that it seems like living without them would be less than three dimensional. in general terms the river is life: it begins with propulsion, some violence, tumult and speed, flooding through narrow cavities in immense volumes, rushing over every obstacle without heed or hindrance and as it progresses, it moves mountains, it finds greater ease in itself and seeks flatter, wider terrain and its violence and confusion settle into a rythm and flow, it finds ease as it seeks to level itself and until it is a fine glass smooth moving wilderness of WATER, and in a day, two days, it is in the sea and you, i, realize that its “it” is nothingness. complete change.