Navigable Waters

While looking in the house a couple of nights ago for a book called "What is Form Criticism?" by Edgar V. McKnight (c) 1967 from a university class on early Christianity, I pulled aside a plastic bag full of books from another era - my late childhood.  A few titles stand out:

• "Programmer's Guide To The 1802 (With An Assembler For Your Machine)" by Tom Swan
• intel Component Data Catalog (c) 1978 ["Four Dollars and Ninety-Five Cents"], Radio Shack part no. 62-1379
• "Profiles In Courage" by President John F. Kennedy
• as well as several books dedicated to the ZX-81/Timex-Sinclair 1000 and hypertext programming

All while biding time until my next fishing expedition.  Today, a little more research on the fishes of Alabama, a discovery that our current view of an expanding universe may be wrong, and then off to another fishing spot.

Swallows nesting.  Hundreds of thousands of maple helicopter seed pods racing, paced, on the river's surface.

Had partially blocked a farm field path when I parked off the road this morning.  The farmer appeared out of the field with his large CASE tractor and disc plow, ready to close the gate and plow another field, so I moved the car for him.  He thanked me and drove on.

Minnows in the shallows.  Water striders jumping around.

The stripped carcass of an 18-inch sucker catfish feeding flies and filling the air with a pungent punch.

The tweet of baby birds begging from a nest in a scrub tree overlooking the water.

The river crossing of a paved country road, the bridge and its concrete piers pockmarked (shooting practice?), with dried mud floodlines up to the top of the piers and the yellow-and-black striped painted water depth markers faded and chipped.

Find a few places to cast out into the middle channel and slowly reel the plastic worm toward shore into a deep eddy.  Around noon here under the bridge's cool shadows and no fish going after the artificial lure.  Can see them darting around the river bottom uninterested.  Time for live bait next time.

Reflections of sunlight, like European discotheque after hours, dancing on the bridge's underbelly.

Midday peace.  Dragonflies.  Green bottle flies feeding on old fish bait.  The chirp of cardinals feeding along the river's edge.  A butterfly bound for nowhere in a hurry.

Swamp bamboo.  Open channel flow.  A few river rapids within view.

The "spray" of sand and gravel, into the river and onto me, from a heavy construction truck riding across the bridge, the bridge I-beam girders bending and bouncing, tiny pieces of rust released in the breeze.

Swallows come back all at once, their chitter-chattering matching their swift movements as they sweep under the bridge, stop momentarily at their nests (to feed babies?) and swoop back up into the warm blue sky for food and play.

Some sticks stuck on the shoreline - leftover handmade catfish fishing poles?  Wads of fishing line and beer containers thrown up into the underbrush.

Drink the rest of my one bottle of beer.  Contemplate lighting a cigar just as a truck pulls up.  Looks like a guy and a gal want some privacy.  Time to pack up and move on.

Back on the road, the ol' Doc McKinney Grocery, reminding me of a friend whose father's farm here in north Alabama used to have a small Cherokee village at the back.  The old Cherokees slowly died off and the village disappeared with their local way of life largely forgotten.  I am an Eagle Scout of a long-since defunct Boy Scout troop, our Scouting ways well documented but our personal trials and trails through Scouting fading with middle age.  Best to remember few will remember us long after we're gone so live for the moment and not some future we don't know we'll see.

Sends me back in time when a couple of guys used to pick up the trash in the evening at my office 12 years ago.  Neither one knew the other but they both fished the local waterways and kept trying to convince me to drop what I was doing (a lot of unpaid after-hours data analysis, at the time), pick up a pole and enjoy life as our forefathers lived, depending on the land for food and happiness.  A coworker got the clue and used to take off to fish the Elk River every chance he got.  I missed the opportunity then.

However, never too late to live the old ways, peel off the layers of civilisation and feel yourself solidly in place with the rest of the natural living things around you.  Your personality fades, conversation loses significance and the problems of the people world barely show up ... for at least one sunny day in mid-spring in the Northern Hemisphere of a small planet circling a yellow star.

Ever watched life spring up on an asteroid passing near the Sun and then fade away for a few hundred years of a cold elliptical path?  Ever watched life on a riverbank, time a measure of shadows and sunlight, every moment an irreplaceable snapshot of life on Earth?

Living waters is a phrase with many meanings - to me, the simple pleasure of sitting silently with algae, minnows, turtles, trees, snakes, grass, spiders, flowers, flies and birds.  Wondering if I'll catch a fish but not caring.  No memories.  No ledger accounts.  Life and death.  Eat, breed and be eaten.