Moving water

The truth?--I was absent-minded even when I was young. I've always had an unhealthy chunk of my great-grandfather's DNA, the Dutch dominie who once skated down a canal on his way to church and was stopped and warned about open water just ahead. What theological truth was on his mind isn't known; what is, is that if he hadn't been warned, he would have skated out to sea. 

On Saturday I went out to the river for a walk because it was the first winsome day in some time, and because I wanted to fool around with that new (well, used) lens, which I then simply forgot to take long. 

You know--this kind of thing.

No matter. I was out there, the camera around my neck, and a close-up lens in the bag. The sun was shining, the wind was negligible, and even though the temp was a bit below freezing, you can live and live well in weather like that.

The most striking feature of Sergeant Floyd's River these days is the ubiquitous detritus (that's a phrase to remember). Everywhere you look, you see the beards of old men still hanging from the cottonwood branches at heights that seem impossible. 

When last summer's floods--yes, there were two--receded, they insisted on leaving their marks. Everywhere, ancient shrunken heads hang from the trees, Absalom-ish, victims of some tribe bloody post-conquest. 

I don't know that I'd call such hangings particularly artful, but it seems fascinatingly funerary (another rare word). I'm sorry--I probably spend far too much time reading Native American stuff because wherever I looked, I saw scalps. Seriously. 

Or the heads of the vanquished impaled on pikes.

What I'm not telling you is that yesterday was my birthday, which any competent shrink, I'm sure, would say accounts for the horrifying intimations of mortality. There's a kind of beauty to the story the trees and saplings tell in winter, but look for yourself at this mess and tell me it isn't the shrunken, misshapen remains of some hapless victim of the Floyd's rage.

I followed the frozen river for a while--it really was a sweet day--until I heard the unlikely sound of rushing water up ahead. Outdoor life in Siouxland has been at a standstill as of late. This is the time of year when farmers, like the seed corn in their bags, start wiggling--a kind of cabin fever thing. I just assumed the river was frozen up tight after all the cold weather, but suddenly the music up ahead seemed unmistakable. 

I don't understand it environmentally, but I do remember reading something about putting stones into streams to create rapids where there weren't any before. Prairie rivers are notoriously cumbersome, until somewhere upstream some rogue storm dumps ten inches over miles and miles of farmland. Otherwise--don't tell him I said it--the Floyd is lazy, barely there come August--lazy and harmless, and silent as a cloud. 

But sure enough, just down river a bit from all those mummies, there's a huge load of pink quartzite somebody put down on the south bank and in the river itself.

It was wonderful. Not just because I knew there was some wise environmental reason for those artificial rapids, but also because all that open water nourished my dreadful Poe-like imagination. Moving water was beautiful. It was life. Beneath all that ice, the river was alive.

Our preacher has this thing about baptism. He calls the kids up to the front and shows them the water. Not only that, he takes the pitcher and pours out water from an arm's length away to make sure they know the water is real. Yesterday, he had them come up close, and when they did, he pinched a shower over 'em. He did. 

I'm not about to say that some environmentally-sound artificial rapids in the Floyd River just south of Alton is really a sacramental manifestation of the grace of God. That might well be something my great-grandfather could preach on. What I know is that I stood right there on the bank of the Floyd River, listening and watching because our preacher isn't wrong about water being real, maybe especially in a string of frozen days around a February birthday. 

Listen again. Tell me that isn't beautiful. Felt something like a sacrament.