IN THE EVENINGS I walk down and stand in the trees, in light paused just so in the leaves, as if the change in the river here were not simply known to me but apprehended. It did not start out this way; I began with the worst sort of ignorance, the grossest inquiries. Now I ask very little. I observe the swift movement of water through the nation of fish at my feet. I wonder privately if there are for them, as there are for me, moments of faith.
The river comes around from the southeast to the east at this point: a clean shift of direction, water deep and fast on the outside of the curve, flowing slower over the lip of a broad gravel bar on the inside, continuing into a field of shattered boulders to the west.
I kneel and slip my hands like frogs beneath the surface of the water. I feel the wearing away of the outer edge, the exposure of rootlets, the undermining. I imagine eyes in the tips of my fingers, like the eyestalks of crayfish. Fish stare at my fingertips and bolt into the river’s darkness. I withdraw my hands, conscious of the trespass. The thought that I might be observed disturbs me.
I’ve wanted to take the measure of this turn in the river, grasp it for private reasons. I feel closer to it now. I know which deer drink at which spots on this bank. I know of the small screech owl nesting opposite (I would point him out to you by throwing a stone in that direction but the gesture would not be appropriate.) I am familiar with the raccoon and fisher whose tracks appear here, can even tell them apart in the dark by delicately fingering the rim of their prints in the soil. I can hear the preparations of muskrats. On cold, damp nights I am aware of the fog of birds’ breath that rolls oceanic through the trees above. Out there, I know which rocks are gripped by slumbering water striders, and where beneath the water lie the slipcase homes of caddis fly larvae.
I feel I am coming closer to it.
For myself, each day more of me slips away. Absorbed in seeing how the water comes through the bend, just so, I am myself, sliding off.
The attempt to wrestle meaning from this spot began poorly, with illness. A pain, slow in coming like so many, that seemed centered in the back of my neck. Then an acute yearning, as strong as the wish to be loved, pain along the ribs, and my legs started to give way. I awoke in the morning with my hands over my face as though astonished by my own dreams. As the weeks went on I moved about less and less, until finally I went to bed and lay there like summer leaves. I could hear the rain in the woods in the afternoon; the sound of the river, like the laughing of horses; smell faintly through the open window the breath of bears. Between these points I was contained, closed off like a spider by the design of a web. I tried to imagine that I was well, but the points of my imagination impaled me, and then a sense of betrayal emptied me.
I began to think (as on a staircase descending to an unexamined basement) about the turn in the river. If I could understand this smoothly done change of direction I could imitate it, I reasoned, just as a man puts what he reads in a story to use, substituting one point for another as he needs.
Several things might be measured I speculated: the rate of flow of the water, the erosion of the outer bank, the slope of the adjacent mountains, the changing radius of curvature as the river turned west. It could be revealed neatly, affirmed with graphic authority.
I became obsessed with its calculation. I lay the plan out first in my head, without recourse to paper. The curve required calculus, and so some loss of accuracy; and the precise depth of the river changed from moment to moment, as did its width. But I could abide this for the promise of insight into my life.
I called on surveyors, geodesic scientists, hydrologists. It was the work of half a year. It involved them in the arduous toting of instruments back and forth across the river and in tedious calculation. I asked that exacting journals be kept, that no scrap of description be lost. There were arguments, of course. I required that renderings be done again, over and over. I became convinced that in this wealth of detail a fixed reason for the river’s graceful turn would inevitably be revealed.
The workmen, defeated by the precision required, in an anger all their own, hurled their theodolites into the trees. (The repair of these instruments consumed more time.) I understood that fights broke out. But I saw none of this. I lay alone in the room and those in my employ came and went politely with their notes. I knew they thought it pointless, but there was their own employment to be considered, and they said the wage was fair.
Finally they reduced the bend in the river to an elegant series of equations, and the books containing them and a bewildering list of variables were all gathered together and brought to my room. I had them placed on the floor, stacked in a corner. I suddenly had the strength for the first time, staring at this pile, to move, but I was afraid. I put it off until morning; I felt my recovery was certain, believed even more forcefully now that my own resolution was at hand by an incontestable analogy.
That night I awoke to hear the dripping of water. From the direction of the pile of notes came the sound of mergansers, the explosive sound they make when they are surprised on the water and suddenly fly off.
I lay back.
Moss grew eventually on the books. They began after a while to harden, to resemble the gray boulders in the river. Years passed. I smelled cottonwood on spring afternoons, and would imagine sunshine crinkling on the surface of the water.
In winter the windows remained open because I could not reach them.
One morning, without warning, I came to a dead space in my depression, a sudden horizontal view, which I seized. I pried myself from the room, coming down the stairs slow step by slow step, all the while calling out. Bears heard me (or were already waiting at the door). I told them I needed to be near the river. They carried me through the trees (growling, for they are not used to working together), throwing their shoulders to the alders until we stood at the outer bank.
Then they departed, leaving the odor of bruised grass and cracked bone hanging in the air.
The first thing I did was to feel, raccoonlike, with the tips of my fingers the soil of the bank just below the water’s edge. I listened for the sound of water on the outer bar. I observed the hunt of the caddis fly.
I am now taking the measure of the bend in these experiences.
I have lost, as I have said, some sense of myself. I no longer require as much. And though I am hopeful of recovery, an adjustment as smooth as the way the river lies against the earth at this point, this is no longer the issue with me. I am more interested in this: from above, to a hawk, the bend must appear only natural and I for the moment inseparably a part, like salmon or a flower. I cannot say well enough how this single perception has dismantled my loneliness.