“The creek’s turnings marked how all that moves must shape itself to the maze of actual landscape, no matter what its preference might be.”—Charles Frazier, Cold Mountain
It was a place where he went to think, where the river spread and shallowed on red sand stones of an ancient sea then fell in crashing and holding pockets of sound and eddying flow before finding escape and falling further away until reaching the slower waters, miles down, where the still and tides of backwaters and joining bay became the river’s end.
The sides of the river sloped upward into hills. In the spring the naked branches bore new green, faint and light, and the undersides of the hills bloomed before the canopies sent their flowers into shadow. In summer, the hills were green, mysteries beneath broad canopies, that spoke in winds and signed in waves of limbs in movement with summer fronts.
Autumn, the colors turned, and the pools of the river held with islands of gathered leaves, fixed to backwalls of holds where the eddies pushed and died in current. There the leaves would stay to eventually sink or find escape, if broken from the greater mass, to dare the falling course of river in its last of mountain life.
Some days, he sat on a dry rock he waded to in higher waters and walked across over shallow shelves in drier seasons. From it, he would pick a point of surface, imagine a single piece of water, and follow it in its fall; its flow across the shelf, soft bouncing on the face of rocks, its fall and purl in pockets before flowing further on–one shelf through another–until beyond sight but still in mind.
He went to the river to think, to sense its flow and study the sights of its surroundings, and when he did, he imagined himself in its place—the pocket of water followed with his eyes—and his own course through the features of his world; the fight he sometimes made to stand, hold, and keep, and how the current swept him to different destinies and design. He thought of the water and how most often, rather than fight, the best he could do was make the most of the ride, accept the caprice in currents, and hope—in some small way—the journey made a mark.
Maybe another watched, eyes fixed to his single point in flow, and maybe his journey captured wonder, inspired a thought, a dream, or hope in someone else. If it had, his life played its part.