The sun is not long from sinking below the horizon-line to the west. Dusk will begin as shadows steal across the water, swallowing the light. Darkness comes to the river valley bottom to top, beginning at the lowest points and moving upward, from stream surface to the stark crowns of the tallest sycamores. That's night's way, to pour in slowly like black oil into a long trough.
A few minutes ago everything was gold—light, sky, moving water. I made a photo. What the image doesn't show is that the water is high, up maybe eight feet from its normal level. High and running fast. A fool's gold river.
Earlier today, while I was working at my desk, I looked up and out the window at the moving river fifty feet from where I sat. As I was watching, a cow floated past. I've watched lots of things float by over the years—countless huge logs and fresh-toppled trees; barrels and buckets; bottles by the gazillion; bright plastic toys of all sorts and every type of ball imaginable; washers and dryers; a car or two; sheds, dog houses, chunks of porches and decks; a red canoe; several dead deer; one dead pig; small dead animals of all sorts, especially dogs and raccoons. One dead person.
But today's cow was a first. I watched it bobbing along, close to the bank, one front leg stuck into the air as if waving a greeting to anyone on shore. In less than a minute the fast current of the fool's gold river had carried the waving cow three hundred yards downstream and around the bend, and I returned to my work.
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28 comments:
HI GRIZZ - do you know what happened to that trapped cow? And also, you saw a dead person float on by?? Good Lord.
Life on the river is an endless stream of surprises.
Love to you
Gail
peace......
To be able to observe a river …. what a great joy that must provide you. Observing all the colors, the light reflections and the life that goes by – or the death. I would not stop daydreaming and it would also give me such a feeling of freedom – the river is free to run (unless man detours or stops it for a dam unfortunately.)
Wait--a cow? A live cow? or dead?
My, the things you see.
And a dead person? Are these things that you feel moved to report?
There are more stories here than your brief report can tell.
Floating cows—even floating dead people in the past. The river assures that you will never be bored!
p.s. I love, love, love the beautiful picture of the golden rippling river. Beautiful
<3
Gail…
Thankfully, the cow was dead. I don't know of any way anyone could have helped a live cow out of the water, and I wouldn't have wanted to see and hear it—but I wouldn't have been able to ignore it, either. Don't know how it ended up in the river, but because of parks and public lands upstream, you'd have to go miles before any farm I can think of where a cow might fall in.
I'll maybe do a post on the body I saw go by. It was a real tragedy
And no, you never know what will float past.
Vagabonde…
Aside from some old milling dams way upstream, which don't impede the flow, this river is free to run it's full 68-mile length, where it empties into another river that empties into the Ohio and thence to the Mississippi…and on to the Gulf of Mexico. I think about that sometimes when something floats past, and wonder how far it will go.
The river is an endless and ever-changing mirror, twisting and mixing the light of the seasons…and providing a fine distraction for a daydreamer.
KGMom…
Dead cow. See my reply to Gail. And yes, there are several good stories in this brief catalog of passing things. One of these days I'll tell you a couple, including the worst one.
George…
No, the ever-moving river and the life thereabouts—and deaths—assure a lack or boredom. It also keeps you grounded in reality, and the tenuous nature of life. You can never live beside a river and remain unchanged.
Gail…
Thank you. I never get tired of photographing the water and its interaction with light. I'm glad you liked the shot.
River = life. The lake was never that precise.
Love this post. Thank you.
Now the question is as a photographer did you not grab an award winning shot of the cow?to see the photos of cars and sheds could be quite interesting-real statements of life on the river-thank god the cow didn't snag up near your porch.I of course would have tried to grab the canoe.
Now, Grizz, you can't just end that paragraph with a casually shocking 'One dead person' and get away with it! More please.
Robin…
A river, because it is ever-moving, always flowing, coming from here and going there, with a past upstream and a future down, responding to light and weather, time-of-day, season—beginning tiny and growing, maturing as it journeys along its path…because of these things and many more, characteristics familiar and shared by humans, rivers easily and often become a metaphor for life.
But they're more than metaphor, they are a matrix for life in myriad forms. And so far as I view them, in every way that matters, rivers are living creatures themselves.
Rivers=life? You bet.
i'm waiting....:)
AfromTO…
Nope, no photo attempt. There wasn'ttime.
When I look out my desk window at the river, it's a downstream view; I'm already looking at water that has gone past the cottage. And I have less than 150 feet of view before the stream's near side gets hidden behind a clump of five huge sycamores at the downstream corner of my yard. The cow wasn't smack against the bank, where there's a sort of continuous eddy, but out about 15 feet, where the current is full and fast because of the high water.
By the time I saw the cow and actually figured out what I was seeing (there was a bit of a surprise, even for me), a couple of seconds, the poor critter was already almost out of view behind the sycamores.
Yes, I do regularly make snap shots at things—hawks and birds of all sorts, squirrels, groundhogs, stray cats, etc. My camera is only inches away and I can grab-aim-fire pretty fast. Occasionally one turns out to be usable. But I'd have had to run out the back door which is right next to my room door, and which I actually did, sans camera, but by the time I got to where the view downstream was unblocked, the floating cow was a little reddish-brown blob, and even with my 400mm lens, and cropping up as much as the image would allow, I'd have still failed.
The best time to photograph things floating past would be on a rise, preferably when it had been a long time since the last high water. That's when the river picks up the most stuff. One of the ways you can tell the stream is no longer coming us is when the floating debris disappears; no more stuff means the river was crested.
How awful Grizz - is this because upstream the river is in flood? I do envy you your river though, in spite of dead things going past at speed. I suppose that is a bit of a comfort - they will only go past when the river is in spate so they won't linger long. Have a good weekend.
Solitary…
Okay, maybe it would be better told in a comment reply than a post, anyway.
Since Blogger Comments won't allow posting a comment longer than about 4000 characters, I'll probably have to split it into two parts.
Anonymous…
Waiting, I presume, for the rest of the story.
[By the way—and don't take this personally, just keep in mind for future information—the way I have things set up here, any comment that comes in from "Anonymous" goes directly into the Spam folder, which I regularly purge without paying close attention to the file's contents, because 99.99 percent of the stuff signed "Anonymous" is trash or worse, and is never going to be allowed on my blog. That's where your comment ended up because of how it was signed. And it was lucky I found it. I have no problem with you keeping your identity secret, but only ask that you sign yourself as, say, "Lurker," "Nameless," "Incognito," or whatever floats your boat. I want you to comment, hope you do—and don't want to lose it. Fair enough?]
Body (p.1)
On Christmas Day 2006, a husband and wife and their two teenage daughters, along with their Labrador pup, decided to take a walk in the 1900 acre park just upstream from the cottage. The man was a twenty-some year veteran employee of the park district, which manages a number of similar-sized parks hereabouts. Moreover, he had been the manager of the park where they were walking for several years. The wife was a nurse at a local hospital and the daughters were both in high school.
The point here is that the father/husband knew the park well, was its head honcho, rule-maker, leader, and was quite aware of its one particular danger. That danger was a low concrete dam, built decades before to back the water up and into a nearby low area and create a shallow pond for recreation. Over the years the pond had filled with sediment and was mostly a marsh. The low dam had always been dangerous because the water pouring over the top created a sort of backswirling undertow, keeping anything trapped and churning against its base. Every few years, someone would fall in, get pinned by the current, and drown. For that reason, and because it no longer served its original purpose, the dam was slated for removal the next year…ironically, by the husband/manager.
Anyway, the couple and their daughters go out for a Christmas afternoon walk. They let the pup run free. The park's rule, a directive instituted and enforced by the manager/husband/father, and all park employees, says "Dogs are welcome, but must be leashed and under control at all times." Yet he chose to break this rule…and break it when they walked over to the single most dangerous feature in the park. Plus the river was up, making the dam and water situation even more dangerous. All of which would have been apparent to anyone who knew the park and river and the dam's hazards.
The pup fell into the water. The wife leaped into the water to save the dog. The husband jumped in to save the wife. All three drowned. Just like that. Quick. A family had celebrated Christmas morning, opened their gifts to one another, and decided to go for a walk in a place they knew intimately. The father didn't follow his own park rule. The daughters ended Christmas Day as orphans. If that isn't a tragedy, I don't know what is because it was so easily preventable.
Of course they tried to recover the bodies that afternoon. And the next day, and the day after that. But the water was high, there was a lot of debris, and the search teams came up empty. For days teams of searchers walked the banks and stood watching the river, covering well over a mile downstream from the accident site. They ran up and down the river in boats. Nothing.
A couple of days after the accident I was watching the river. I saw an object just under the surface come floating downstream. A body, I was sure of it, wearing a jacket or sweater. I quickly called the search headquarters. In minutes a half-dozen searchers appeared. I told what I saw. No one knew the color of the couple's outer-garments. They made calls. Finally they decided the woman had been wearing a similar colored coat…but they also though it was too soon, were sure the bodies were still snagged near the original site, and decided I'd just seen some trash or whatever. Everybody left. They sent one searcher back to stand and watch from the deck. She kept at it for a the rest of the day. A week or so later a guy in a kayak found the mother's body several miles downstream. The father's body was found by a passerby more than a month after that, also miles downstream. The pup's body turned up a few days after the accident in my downstream neighbor's yard.
The grandparents temporarily moved from another part of the state to the girls's home in a small town near here, so they could finish out high school where they'd always attended among their friends.
I have no doubt it was the mother's body I saw float past.
Body (p.2)
Well, the whole comment went—amazing, especially since it wouldn't go when added to the first four lines of my reply to Solitary Walker. Must have been just a few characters too long. Anyway, no part 2.
Weaver…
Yes…well, maybe.
When the water rises, which expands the river's width and carries into new territory, any object that floats is picked up and floated off by the current. If it has been a long time since the last high water, it's amazing the amount of stuff that comes floating down—practically anything imaginable so long as it floats. A lot of wind before a heavy rain that raises the water will put lots of limbs and rotted trees into the water. A violent summer windstorm will fill the river with green leaves.
If one high water comes on the heels of another, though—and especially if the second isn't quite as high as the first—not much at all comes floating past.
In the cow's case, it could have gotten too close to the bank, which suddenly gave way and toppled the poor beast into the deep water…and given that the water is really cold, that would soon have been it. Cows, as I'm sure you know, can always manage to get in trouble if it's available. That's one scenario—another is that the animal was already dead and the rising water simply picked it up and carted it off. Or it could have been caught in the mud, like some prehistoric critter in a tar pit, and drowned as the water arose, to be washed away when it got high enough to float it free. And finally, some farmer upstream might have gone out to the barn one morning, found he had a dead cow on his hands to now dispose of, hooked the cow on the back of the tractor and dragged it to the riverbank—where it was summarily rolled into the water, swept away, and would then become the problem of whoever downstream ended up with the deceased bovine aground in their back yard.
Rivers have long been the garbage dumps of the cretins.
Thanks for the backstory, Grizz — a grisly one, and not without its tragic ironies. I don't know what to say in the face of this, unless it's the observation that you witness from your riverbank every aspect of life and death. There's certainly a darker side to the riverbank narrative; it's not all ducks and dappled sunlight...
Solitary…
Thank you for commenting. A number of readers wanted to hear the story, but as I figured, the details rather trumped curiosity. A real downer. I don't know what there is to say afterwards. It was a tragedy, yet one so preventable and needless. I'd known the father for years, not well, but we'd had a number of casual conversations in the park. I just come away from this feeling truly awful.
This is not at all a "dangerous" river. It is slow-moving and shallow—I've waded almost every single mile except for a few at the final stretch. In the other 95 percent, about half the time you can literally walk from bank to bank and not get wet above your knees—and the other half is seldom above your waist. You really have to work at getting yourself in trouble here. For any canoeists who can't swim but decide to enjoy a float downstream for a few hours, the best safety advice you can give the (other than wear a life jacket) is if you turn over and land in the pool, just stand up.
This river certainly isn't as dangerous as your average city street. But the most gentle pastoral brook deserves caution when rains or snow-melt turn it high and fast. Nature always deserves respect.
Wow you have a full circle of life on that river-love, peace, drama, life, death.You don't need tv.
Scribe--the story of the body is indeed sad. We live near the Susquehanna River, which also has several low dams. And each year there are drownings. Usually, a boater gets too near a dam, tips over and ends up being trapped. Same outcome.
AfromTO…
Yes, the full range—sometimes dramatic, sometimes tragic, but always interesting. As is life closely observed anywhere.
KGMom…
Low dams are treacherous everywhere if there's enough water coming over to create a backchurn at their base. This particular one, though small by most standards, killed someone every few years, and I don't think anyone knows the tally of lives it has taken. Thank goodness it is now gone.
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