Morning Thanks--River fair, river fowl

You got to know it's there or you'll miss it. It's classic "backroads," no sign to let you know that if you take it, you'll love it. Maybe there should be. Then again, maybe not. 

Even though it runs so close to the Missouri that if you step out you'll get a soaker; even though when you take that road, you're about as close to spotting the Core of Discovery as you can be anywhere on the trail of Lewis and Clark; and even though that road is so close to the water that there are times when it floods, that gravel path is as sweet a road as you can find anywhere. You can't help but think that even though you're in a Honda Pilot (or whatever), you're "on the river."

The Missouri River is "braided" here, so full of channels it has a look unlike anywhere else on its long and winding route. Right now the grassy channels are still brown from winter; so when you see it from the hills all around, it seems someone's built a pontoon bridge all the way across, wooden. In a sense, that's what the Army Corps of Engineers has done--but it's not wooden.

The Missouri River dams, built in 1957, have done wonderful things for the Dakotas, created huge, sparkling lakes full of game fish, and delivered water to farmers and ranchers who needed it. But those dams also wreaked considerable havoc. Big Muddy's tribs dump tons of sediment, as they have for eons. The Niobrara relieves itself of 1,400 acre-feet of sediment each year, enough to cover a football field a quarter –mile deep.

Once upon a time the Missouri was an outlaw whose spring floods brought misery to those who lived close--and even some who didn't. Those floods, mile-wide power washers, washed sediment farther downstream. Today, barring a flukey year a decade ago when someone fell asleep at the controls, those dams have made the river a puppy.

And that leaves the sediment, tons and tons of it, makes it look like the little video up top. Somebody has to do something. Every one knows it. But it's easier not to.
Besides, strangely enough, the braided effect has its own kind of beauty--and, because the river is no more unruly a parakeet, its dammed sweetness is kind of nice.

Last week, we took that wonderful river road east out of Running Water (which isn't really a town, but once was), and, thusly, were as much on the river, as if we were on some skiff.

Tons of waterfowl were right beside us, so many I couldn't help wondering how many more must have been here just a month or so ago, when migration had to be all the rage. The "Big Five" weren't here, but there were moments when we were creeping along as if we were on an African Safari. Wherever you looked, there were birds.

Long, skinny ones. . .

Or little-squirt squat ones merrily on one leg,

some of them in their own stunning finery.

I could have shot all day, but seeing all that cool stuff through a lens can get in the way of seeing the sometimes shocking beauty of a Creator's touch.

Wasn't supposed to be that way--all that sediment, all that detritus in the river, clogging it up like the way it does right now. Wasn't natural. Isn't how God created it. 

A stickler could get huffy about all of that, and some do.

But this morning, I'm thankful for a little waterfowl safari we stumbled on almost totally unawares, a nature trek that brought us up-close-and-personal to waterfowl, great and small, each of them as blessed as we were to be there.