Severe Clear

In the low 40's, with a little wind, but clear as a bell. Early enough to town to get below the floodwall, and there are some wrack lines I want to walk. The Ohio was brown with silt caught in the snow-melt, and vicious looking, whirlpools and currents. The crew on a string of barges going up-river looked miserable and hard-pressed. Where the Scioto enters the Ohio, their waters were different colors brown, and they made an angry swirl going downstream. Rivers, streams, lakes, oceans, I've always lived near water, three streams and two lakes in Mississippi, and a goodly stream uncomfortably near the back door in Colorado (it only had a few fish, at first, but I stocked it with native trout I caught nearby), and now I have a river, though, in truth, not as big as the St Johns where I knew her, below Jacksonville. For the longest time I entertained the ideas of living in a shanty boat on the St Johns. So many wild tributaries then, wild-wild, bears and beavers and otters and gators, snakes as big as your arm, bobcats and wildcats, manatee; and fish, jesus christ did we catch the fish there, whatever we wanted, whenever we wanted. It's all boat docks and high-priced spreads now, of course, and I'd have to have moved on anyway. I don't subscribe to destiny, or anything even close, life is happenstance, place is where you find yourself. I seem to require the natural world, large uninhabited spaces, it wasn't a conscious choice and I'm not sure it matters. I might be able to live in an apartment in town, now, at this point in my life, when I really want to just read and write, BUT visiting the natural world is not the same as living in it. I'm not sure I could give up the direct connection. Today there were fox prints in the snow, and the spot where she had killed a vole. This was prime time for me, reality not TV. I hunkered down and tried to understand the sequence of what had happened. I looked at some blood on the snow, and some footprints, for more than an hour, and came to no absolute conclusion. But it was a wonderful hour. Speculation. Nothing succeeds like sitting still for an hour and watching what happens.