By This River(top)

In a period of time with more than the usual rainfall, when the streams and rivers have been running high and off-color, the fishing is limited and I look more to the unsung lives and places of the rivertops.

There’s a bass pond near this rivertop site, but its photo didn’t show.

 

Their allure is temporary, perhaps, but no less joyful in being common. If you doubt me, take some minutes and look at nature’s small surprises found along the yard’s edge or the roadside. Step aside from the usual track and cast a line to a summit pond or ramble freely through the forest.

So I pause for the uncommon and allow myself some interaction there. Why not? It’s quiet there and sane. The ground is drier but infused with mystery and beauty. Facebook is a world away. The dust has settled from Supreme Court rulings on ObamaCare and same sex marriage. Nature is evolving as it should be (problems due to climate change not included).

Even black bass get the blues sometimes.

I might focus on the natural sphere more readily while I’m standing in a stream or river, but these drier places are no less worthy of my efforts, or as likely to be appreciated by others–

As a poem by Emily Dickenson might suggest:

The Hills erect their purple heads,/ The rivers lean to see–/ Yet Man has not, of all the throng,/ A curiosity.

The rivers lean to see, always going somewhere even when they’re stationary, and I like to think that my own rambling efforts echo that condition whether I’m walking or resting on a bench. Like a songbird, mushroom, beaver, pine tree, or a frog, each of us has a

from poppers like this, but of course I let them go

special link to water. Each of us is penetrated by a river’s influence.

There’s a humbling aspect to these wayside investigations, even when my head is in the way of clear perception, ringing with the nonsense of an ignorant society. Again, from Emily–

I’m nobody! Who are you?/ Are you nobody, too?/ Then there’s a pair of us– don’t tell!/ They’d banish us, you know.// How dreary to be somebody! How public, like a frog/ To tell your name the livelong day/ To an admiring bog!

i’m nobody, and you?

a small “flock” of ragged robins

who’s been nibbling on amanita?

shelf space for some fly-fishing memories

go on, walt, get outta here

go fishin’ or something, will ya?

i’m serious!

the falls at Wiscoy Creek because i couldn’t resist