THE OVERALL IMPRESSION HERE, as one surveys the river spread out over the gravel bars, is of a suspension of light, as though light were reverberating on a membrane. And a loss of depth. The slope of the riverbed here is nearly level, so the movement of water slows; shallowness heightens the impression of transparency and a feeling for the texture of the highly polished stones just underwater. If you bring your eye to within a few inches of the surface, each stone appears to be submerged in glycerin yet still sharply etched, as if held closely under a strong magnifying glass in summer light. An illusion—that insight into the stone is possible, that all distraction can be peeled away or masked off, as in preparation for surgery, while sunlight penetrates and highlights—is encouraged.
Beyond the light, a loss of depth, as the subsurface nears the surface, as though the river were exposing itself to examination. Kneel with your ear to the water; beyond the plorp of it in a hollow and the slooshing gurgle through labyrinthine gravels, are the more distant sound of its fugue. A musical notebook lies open—alto and soprano clefs, notes tied and trills, turned notes, indications of arpeggio and glissando. Plunge your ear in suddenly—how it vanishes. Take the surface of the river between your thumb and forefinger. These textures are exquisite, unexpected.
Step back. The light falling on the dry rocks beneath our feet seems leathery by comparison. And this is another difference: the light on the dry rock is direct, shaftlike, almost brutal, so rigid one can imagine a sound like crystal lightly stung with a fingernail if it were touched; while the cooler light on the rocks in the water is indirect, caressing. This is why if you pluck a stone from the water and allow it to dry it seems to shrivel. It is the same as that phenomenon where at dusk you are able to see more clearly at the periphery of your vision. An indirect approach, the sidelong glance of the sun through the water, coaxes out the full character of the naturally reticent stone.
Fish are most exposed in the shallows, and so move through quickly. One afternoon I saw an osprey here, reminiscent of a grizzly at the water’s edge anticipating salmon. A fish came by; he took off lightly and snatched it from the water.
Here, step across; you’ll be able to examine things better out on the gravel bars. (We are fortunate for the day—temperatures in the eighties I understand.) Look, now at the variety of stones. Viewed from the bank these gravel bars seem uniformly gray, but bend close and you see this is not true. It’s as though at first glance nothing were given away. You could regard this as the stone’s effort to guard against intrusion by the insincere. Here, look at these: the red, chert, a kind of quartz; this streaked gray, basalt; the greenish one, a sedimentary rock, shale, stained with copper; the blue—this is uncommon: chrysocolla, a silicate. The white, quartzite. Obsidian. Black glass. This brown, andesite. It’s reassuring to hear the names, but it’s not so important to remember them. It’s more important to see that these are pieces of the earth, reduced, ground down to an essential statement, that in our lifetime they are irreducible. This is one of the differences between, say, stones and flowers.
I used to throw a few stones out into the river—underhand with a flick of the wrist, like this.
It is relatively simple, in a place where the river slows like this, fans out over the gravel, to examine aspects of its life, to come to some understanding of its history. See, for example, where this detritus has caught in the rocks? Raccoon whisker. Hemlock twig. Dead bumblebee. Deer-head orchid. Maidenhair fern. These are dry willow leaves of some sort. There are so many willows, all of which can interbreed. Trying to hold each one to a name is like trying to give a name to each rill trickling over the bar here, and making it stick. Who is going to draw the lines? And yet it is done. Somewhere this leaf has a name, Salix hookeriana, Salix lasiandra.
Piece of robin’s egg, perhaps after a raid by a long-tailed weasel. Chip of yew tree bark. Fireweed. Snail shell—made out of the same thing as your fingernail. Here, tap it—Or a rattlesnake’s rattles. Roll it around in your hand. Imagine the clues in just this. Counting the rings would tell you something, but no one is sure what. Perhaps all that is recorded is the anguish of snails. Oh, this is rare: fox hairs. You can tell by the coloring. Some say it is the degree of taper, the shape. Up above someplace a fox crossed over. Or was killed by someone.
Behind the larger stones—let’s walk up this way—hung up in their crevices is another kind of detritus entirely, a layer of understanding that becomes visible only under certain circumstances, often after a thunderstorm, for example, when the air has a sudden three-dimensional quality and it appears it might be slit open neatly and examined from the inside. What you see then, tethered to the rocks as though floating on the silken threads of spider webs adrift in the balmy air, are the sighs of sparrows passing overhead. The jubilation of wind-touched aspens. The persistence of crayfish, the tentative sipping of deer, who have stepped clear of the cover of trees, the circumspection of lone fish.
And there are still other revelations beyond these. You can imagine what might be learned in a place like this if one took the time. Think only of the odors, some single strand of which might be nipped between rocks, of wild-flowers (lupine, avalanche lily, the white blossoms of bunchberry, yellow balsamroot, crimson currant), of musk (needle-toothed weasel, sleek-furred mink, bright-eyed fisher, grizzly bear on his rump, eating the seed pods of dogtooth violet), of suncracked earth, the odor of granite. Just so, by these invisible extensions is the character of the river revealed, is there some clue to what goes unexamined.
If you lie out flat on the stones—it seems odd to try, I know—you will feel—here, that’s it—the warmth of the sunlight emanating from the stones. Turn your head to the side, ear to rock, and you will hear the earth revolving on its axis and an adjustment of stones in the riverbed. The heartbeats of salmon roe. One day I heard the footsteps of someone miles away, following someone else.
If you look up into the sky, straight up, eight or ten miles, it is possible to imagine the atmospheric tides, oceans of air moving against the edge of space in an ebb and flow as dependent on the phases of the moon. I believe lying here on the gravel bars cannot be too different from lying on your back on the bottom of the ocean. You can choose to take this view or not, with no fear of consequence. The tides go on, regardless.
Let’s walk along the edge.
The fish this garter snake has just snatched is called a dace, a relative of the creek chub, a life more obscure than most. The snake is Thamnophis couchi hydrophila, a western species. You can take the naming as far as you want. Some of the most enjoyable things—the way the water folds itself around that rock and drops away—have no names.
You are beginning to shiver, but it’s nothing to be alarmed over. The stones warmed you; you sensed you were nestled in the earth. When you stood up fear pooled in an exposed feeling around your back. This is what to leave the earth means. To stand up, which you see bears do on occasion. At the very heart of this act is the meaning of personal terror.
Along the very edge of these gravel bars are some of the earth’s seams. A person with great courage and balance could slip between the water and the rock, the wet and the dry, and perhaps never come back. But I think it must take as much courage to stay.
I have stood for hours on these gravel bars. I have seen the constellations reflected in chips of obsidian glass. My hands have gone out to solitary willows in the darkness. Once I lay without moving for days until, mistaking me for driftwood, birds landed nearby and began speaking in murmurs of Pythagoras and winds that blew in the Himalayas.
I regretted throwing stones into the river.