The River

Kayaked my favorite stretch of the Sacramento, camping by the river and walking in the dusk beneath the territorial flights of the Common Nighthawk. Watched one flying directly above me. He did his loose, floppy flight but every few strokes he gave a nasal peent call while, at the same time, suddenly doing several strong, rapid wingbeats and rising upward on the effort. This succession of floppy flight and strong flight gradually propelled the nighthawk higher and higher. Then he tucks in his wings and goes into a 45 degree dive, accelerating until he pulls out with a feather-vibrating buzzy boom and then starts the process again. As I watched him, I could hear the other flying males within our soundscape. I can imagine that these males (and the females below) can gauge the strength/vitality of the other males by either (a) how loud and sustained the buzzy boom was which is a function of how far and fast the bird dove or (b) how often the boom is heard which indicates how fast the bird rises back up to the dive point. 

As I walked on in the dusk, I wished I could have shared the nighthawk time with some of my students. Talking about it does not capture the direct inflow of hearing freshly the world telling another story. Telling can’t capture the feeling of heading outward in the summer’s long, warm dusk (intentionally without a flashlight) for a walk beneath the gradually emerging stars. These direct interactions with the world are where the magic of learning lies and also where lies the magic of rejuvenation for the exhausted soul. The magic that lies in the direct interaction and can’t be abstracted is the heart of “phenomenology”. My daughter, Dawn, came up with a good simile for this when she was analyzing the difference between history as it has come to have meaning to her and history as presented in a textbook. History (or nature) is like an in-depth outline and a textbook is just the upper-level first and second headings of the outline. All the lower order headings are left out and that is where the personal connection forms. 

I turned back in my roam when I saw the first star come out (not counting the crescent moon, Venus, and Jupiter which were shining brightly.) I remembered how my brother, sister, and I would sleep out in the backyard when I was probably 5 and watch the stars come out. Sometimes we would count the stars as they came out. Thinking the pattern of star emergence might be a good graphing activity I could do with Chrysalis kids, I came up with a systematic way of quickly counting all the stars in the sky. I then stopped about every five minutes on my stroll back to camp to count stars. 1, 2, 3, 4, 7, 12, 42, 74. (What image comes to your mind when you hear of a roam out in the gathering dusk that did not end until 74 stars were out?)

The next morning, I floated in the early morning light, playing in the eddies and the edges, drifting through insect swarms, watching butterflies on the mustards, swallows coursing a foot above the river. Often I work at staying in the middle of the current because it’s a more exciting ride. But playing on the edges gives a completely different sense of the river. I wanted to share this slow wondrous style of floating with Alysia so two days later, for our twenty-third anniversary we floated this, our favorite stretch of the Sacramento, again, starting in the golden evening glow, camping the night and then dawdling along the eddies and the shores all morning. A river otter lithely foraged amongst plants along the shore. S/he saw us, startled, judged us not a threat, and continued on. We floated slowly by, close to a slow eddy that would carry us back past close to the otter. A few quiet strokes got us into the eddy but as we floated back up, the otter went into the river and dove and rose several times further upstream. We continued idling up, seeing the otter’s head occasionally surface before diving again. As we neared the top of the eddy, I saw the otter riding the current down past us. As we returned to the main current, the otter hauled out downstream onto a slow-falling sycamore tree projecting out over the current. We floated nearer. The otter tensed, prepared to dive back in, but then held its ground. As we floated by five yards away, we looked one another directly in the eye. Felt good. Eye contact – a direct communication from soul to soul.