At the end of May I went kayaking in the Warner Wetlands with two friends. (Some images below) One thing I enjoyed was watching how their minds started wrestling with the same thoughts I wrestled with the first time I kayaked on a wetland filling with snowmelt.
I assumed a current was steady and eventually flows to the sea. But that is not the case in a wetland filling. A place with a current one day might have no current the next day. Overnight, it filled and backed up in a way that shunts the current into a new channel that was not available until after yesterday’s current backed up to there. We measure water depth with our paddles, trying to fit two puzzle pieces together: how the visible surface of the water is moving and what the invisible shape of the submerged channel is. Traci (who took the pictures) asked whether an ideal ball would roll all the way down the channel if the water was not here. No, the bottom can have dips and pools where the ball would come to rest. What is happening down below when the current speeds up? What…? Why…?
Everywhere was so warm and sunny and peaceful. “Summertime , and the living is easy.” One could coast through the next couple of months. But life’s edge is closer than that. One might not be alive next summer. Now is the time to take on the energy-intensive work of successfully creating and raising the next generation. The wetlands were quiet. Few birds were visible. But occasionally my kayak came too close to a hidden nest and a duck burst into the air. We came to sense that this quiet place was intensely full of birds setting still on their nests.
Snippet
I’ve realized that when I enclose several articles in one post, only the titled one shows up on the blog post. The others are invisible for someone looking for the first time. So I will start posting only one article at a time instead of waiting until I have two or three.
Leave a Reply