On the Left bank

At Goodwill the other day, I picked up Simon Winchester's account of the Yangtze River, The River at the Center of the World.  About all the Yangtze and the Ottauquechee have in common is that each has two banks with water flowing in between.  All the same, a river is a river, and Winchester taught me something right away:  the left bank is the side on the left as you face downstream.  It took me 67 years to learn this.  I have seen countless references to the Left Bank of the Seine and never understood what that meant. The left bank of the Ottauquechee is to the north, and more locally, on the River Street side.

I was out here earlier than usual, around eight.  Lingering dawn light brushed cloud and river surface. 

The crew that had been here a week or so ago to set up scaffolding underneath the Middle Bridge returned this morning.  Under-bridge stabilizing cables need attention.  I saw workers manhandling two 30-foot aluminum catwalks down the steep left bank just upstream of the bridge. preparatory to attaching them from below, suspended above the current.  A small dinghy lay nearby.  A FEMA-funded project, and, I guess, a legacy of the power of Tropical Storm Irene. 

Rain and Flow

 

I wrote yesterday of the local dance of raindrops, rings and ripples.  The river has a minute, yet real, part in the great dance performed by the water of our Earth.  The hydrologic cycle, which swings round at a variety of tempos, both feeds and drains the Ottauquechee.   Wikipedia tells us, "The water moves from one reservoir to another, such as from river to ocean, or from the ocean to the atmosphere, by the physical processes of evaporation, condensation, precipitation, infiltration, runoff, and subsurface flow."

When it is raining, we see before our eyes a tight arc of the circle: precipitation out of the clouds, the runoff that is the river.  At moments like this morning's, when I took the picture, we see pieces of the great cycle, above and below.  The clouds reflected on the water simply await the next steps of the dance. Like familiar partners, they they are in time with one another before they touch..

Dancing with the Rain

 

Water dripping from the bridge created a line of rippling circles, each starting as a perfect ring, then losing definition as it expanded until disappearing into the current.  Drops followed after and upon the other without pause.  From left to right below the edge of the bridge, rings appeared, grew larger, dissipated, then formed again.  Variations of these movements scored the whole surface of the river, as circles from the rain and swirls from the current interacted in perpetual motion.

Rain and stream danced.

Over the Face of the Waters

As I approached the bridge at about nine this morning, a yellow tour bus pulled over nearby.  With foliage mostly down, fewer buses roll through the village these days. 

Standing by my spot mid-span, I watched the river.  In the distance, just where it necks to the left to form the gentle rapids downstream, I could see the widening circles formed by raindrops, from shore to shore.  Slowly, the footprints of this gentle shower moved toward the bridge.  I enjoyed seeing the rain mass moving upstream, strolling against the flow of the Ottauquechee.

Travelers from Heidelberg, Germany, on a New England tour before heading to visit their sister city in Minnesota, took pictures of the bridge and stretched their legs on Mountain Avenue.

Oak Follows Maple

 

While some maples still shed their leaves, the river bears oak leaves alone today.  

Yesterday we sang, "Time, like an ever-rolling stream, bears all our years away."  Rivers flow in one direction, just as time only goes forward. In imagination and study, we can trace the river backwards though.

I will try to find out the roots of the Ottauquechee.  I assume its present general form flowed from the retreating glaciers of ten millennia ago.  The advancing ice would have carved a way through the softer stuff, creating future stream beds.  As the glacier melted, the water would have poured massively through the paths the ice carved out.

Near the bridge, the hard rock of Mounts Tom and Peg channeled the Ottauquechee.  Over the centuries, the river banks meandered north and south, carving and laying down the Shire valley soil.

Making Up for Lost Time

 

As I was away for a few days and did not post, I will make it up today with a few extras. The one above I took at about noon.  The river is down a bit as the rain has mostly stopped for now.  The "index log" is above the water, mostly.  You can make it out in the shadow of the rock below.

 

Leaves continue to flow.

Some gather near the shore for awhile.

These last three are not particularly good photos. I took them with my regular camera's zoom.  It's tough to get good focus when the zoom is tight, the objects moving and the hand just a wee bit unsteady.  All the same, in the leaf shots, the fuzziness speaks, without my intention, of the fluid nature of leaves pulled toward a transformation into river stuff, the movement of shreds of tree matter into something else, someday, downriver.

The Ottauquechee in the late afternoon today, with the sun slanting beneath the clouds to touch the nearly leafless trees.

Rising Water, Falling Leaves

I was away most of the week in New Haven, Connecticut, where the Quinnipiac River flows into Long Island Sound.  After days of rain in Vermont, the Ottauquechee rose as the leaves fell.  We are approaching "stick season," the spare time after foliage and before snow.  For those who love to behold the crooked geometry of bare trunk and limb, let the contemplation begin.  We have now five or more months to enjoy, at least here in the north country.  The snow will cast those river-like shapes into even more stark relief, until the late spring rejuvenation.

Rudolf Steiner taught that this time without blossom or leaf signaled Earth's awakening from the dream of summer, a summoning of a crystalline awareness free of vegetative fancies.  He urged us to wake up as well. Crystals the river knows have been, and will be again, ice.  This morning, I scraped some off the windshield for the second or third time this fall. 

The risen river water moves more swiftly than last week's lighter stream.  Watching the leaves flow from under the bridge, they hurried toward the far bend at a FedEx pace.  No ice there yet, at least that I have seen.

Center and Edge

I read once that a difference between the first Europeans who came here and the indigenous people they found was their sense for the role of rivers.  For the newcomers, a river marked a boundary. "My land is on this side, yours on the other."  For the native peoples, the river was the center of a territory, the surrounding mountains forming borders.  This seems more wholistic, a homeland and a watershed as one and the same.  Is the river the center of a place?  Is it at the edge? 

I find it striking that the river both unites and divides.  It pulls water down from its root-shaped system of feeder streams, gathering an ever-expanding flow.  At the same time, it creates a barrier, a border, a place where you have to find a bridge.

Into the Regions Beyond

"Going beyond ordinary limits; surpassing; exceeding." One dictionary cites this as the first definition of the word "transcendent."  Rivers are transcendent, at least in an ordinary sense.  The water flows from places beyond our sight, in the moment, at least, then flow beyond our sight again.  The river exceeds our ability to take it all in.  Of course, satellite technology allows seeing the whole thing, but we are then experiencing an image, not the thing itself. No one can see a whole river, while standing by it.

In that way, it is like the sea or sky, transcendent.

Home is Where the River Is

This morning on the bridge, a couple from Indiana, Pennsylvania, stopped and stood next to me.  Together we gazed as the river flowed.  The man asked, "Are you from here?"  Realizing that this was not the time to explain the difference between a flatlander like myself and a real Vermonter, I simply said, "Yes."

He went on, "Is this a trout stream?" To this question I could say, with more confidence, "Yes!" Just a few days ago I had watched a YouTube posting of trout being caught, and released, less than a mile upriver.

"I'm a fisherman.  Seeing this river makes my mouth water," he said.  He looked downstream, eyes shining.

Northwest Wind and Risen Water

 

Rising water from Thursday's rain and a northwest wind reshaped the surface today.  The river flowed over most of my marker log, with one tip just out of the water, and a damp border to show the higher point where the stream had reached not long before.  

Lately, the shallower water along both banks seemed barely to flow at all.  How else could robins take leisurely baths?  Today the river moves from bank to bank.  Closer looks show there is still a difference.  The central current move more swiftly. Then, as the river narrows, the differing hydraulics collide and merge, creating the impression of a moving pot on low boil.  The wind swirls down from Mt. Tom, creating its own eddies, one succeeding another, overlapping and disappearing.

It Just Keeps Rollin'

 

Constellations of leaves fell this morning, where they joined a steady flow downriver.  The peak of fall foliage has past, and while colors persist, many bare branches now etch the sky. With the rain, sediment from a thousand upstream twists and turns darkens the river, turning yesterday's clarity into near murk.  

Tributaries add to the eroding work of the Ottauquechee. One map shows 14 streams joining it between the Middle Bridge and Taftsville.  It empties out as one of 14 Vermont branches big enough to be named a tributary to the Connecticut, the Mississippi of New England.

The song, "Ole Man River" has been coming to me as I wonder what is like to be the Ottauquechee.

One line that stays with me: "It just keeps rollin'."  Whether we watch it or not, the water flows, day and night, month by month, year by year, century by century, millenium by millenium.  The river did have a birth and, left alone, will come to an end in its own time, but on no scale we can ever experience.

Time Flies

 

This morning I saw robins on the left bank.  Last February, some robins surprised me in our driveway.  I had never seen them in deep of winter before.  It turns out some robins, males more than females, tend to winter as far north as Ontario.  As I watched, a handful of redbreasts flurried back and forth from the water's edge to low hanging trees.  In the few inches of rocky shallows, the robins submerged themselves nearly to their necks and fluttered.  

Here is another answer to the question I pose to the Ottauquechee, "What is it like for you?"  The stream answers, "I am a bird bath."

Enjoying the pond-still water, were these robins washing up for a trip south, or just taking advantage of  the unseasonable 60 degrees to do some personal hygiene?  Then I noticed a male cardinal doing the same thing, more conspicuous with his brighter red, and nearby, not bathing, strode a cardinal female hopping among the rocks.  A grackle showed up as well, so three or four birds, each a few feet from one another, splashed around, as if they had all the time in the world.

Fine Tuning

On the bridge this morning I met workers removing staging from beneath the bridge.  They had begun to put it in place the day before, with plans to fine tune the cables stabilizing the structure from below.  "So it doesn't look like a banana some day," I recall the foreman saying.  Last minute word from FEMA, though, was that the money to pay for the work would not be available until December, he said.  His workers hauled immensely long aluminum gangways back up the steep bank.  I did not ask him why FEMA was involved, but one guess would be the Irene flood had an impact on those cables. 

The river continues to lower.  Rain forecasted over the next days will bring it up again.

What the River Does

 

So, what is it like for you, Ottauquechee?  Some say it is a guy thing to define who you are by your function.  "What do you do?" being the question coming up early in a guy-to-guy conversation.  I know I have posed it countless times.  So, Ottauquechee, what do you do?

If the stream spoke, she might say, "I take mountains down to build them up again."  Our river, with utter persistence, will help Killington mountain erode away.  In mining the works of popular geology by writers like John McPhee and Simon Winchester, we learn how the slow and sure process of mountain building shares the planet with that ineluctable process of rain falling, gathering into streams, pulling earth and stone with them and, with infinitesimal pace, layers the silt of peaks onto the floors of oceans, where the foundations of Everests await.

Today's clear waters work this process, unseen: New England flowing away.  The floating leaves give us just a hint.

Morning and Evening, the Sixth Day

The clouds this morning reflected on the Ottauquechee, with the river slowly lowering as more rainless days go by.  This is the Saturday of Columbus day weekend.  Cars formed a line to the west as far as the eye could see.  Early in the day, the trees lacked the fire of sunlight to attract the cameras, so I took the shot above alone on the bridge.

I returned at about 5 p.m., with folks from the buses crowding the walkway and its southern side.  The view from that approach sang, with late afternoon light blazing in a yellow maple by the bridge and Mt. Tom's colors a backup chorus.  Again, sights worth preserving, and they were, over and over.

Looking to the east this evening, joined by several visitors, I heard someone say he saw a fish right below, a catfish, he claimed.  Others did not believe it, and after a bit he admitted it was a shadow.

Risking the iPhone being jostled from my grasp, I leaned over and took this shot of the clear stream, the image lit in the center by a diagonal shaft of sun, bordered on one side by the current's ripples and on the other by the leaf peepers' Holy Grail, foliage about to fall, reflected on the vesper river. 

Extra images today, as tomorrow, I take a Sabbath break from blogging.

In the Clear Depths

Looking today at another cloud-studded blue sky and blue and pale reflections on the river, I wondered about life beneath that surface.  In an odd way, shadows on the river allow us to see into the water more clearly, especially if the stream runs as clear as the Ottauqueechee has done lately.  After Tropical Storm Irene, the waters were impenetrable for months, changing only in their shades of brown or grey.  Now only the passing leaves and frothy islands block the view of the bottom, several feet down at its deepest by the bridge.

I have not spent vast amounts of time monitoring what passes underwater there, yet it still seems odd that I have yet to see a fish.  I did see an unfamiliar looking duck splash suddenly into the water and then take off as abruptly, flying west under the bridge.  Did it catch something?

In my usual time-challenged manner, I googled "Fishing on the Ottauquechee" and found a charming youtube video, shot, it appears, just upstream of the Rt. 4 bridge on the way out of town.  To a soundtrack of soothing piano, the camera chronicled the catch of  a small trout.  The shot then lingered on the hand of the fisherman holding the now unhooked fish underwater in the most gentle way, and then releasing it back into the stream.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=omXVa3fFDBA

The Surface

Once again, I was on the bridge in the morning.  The breeze from the west had strengthened from the day before, pushing surface ripples downstream with the current. Even with the gentle wind-blown wrinkles, it is striking that on this calm patch of river the most striking visual phenomena are shadows and reflections.  

Morning from the Middle Bridge

Over the Face of the Water

Breezes from the west sent rippling patterns across the water this morning.  They created gentle crisscrossing swells, as, I am guessing, current, water depth and wind shadows shaped the courses of the various bands, mingling them.  The shape shifting went on and on.  A chaos theorist might see fractals here.

Can the Ottauquechee be defined? I looked to the Internet's thoughts on the name's meaning: "swift mountain stream" or "swiftly moving water" or "waters of the chasm."  The Abenaki people, who preceded the Europeans, left the name behind.

In the Gospel of John, while sitting by a well,  Jesus talks with the Samaritan woman about "living water."  Some think that a moving stream, as opposed to well water, may have been described in those times as "living."

How does the river live?  It moves, sounds, rises, falls, darkens, brightens.  Today, it seemed only to play.

Misty Morning

No tourists trod the Middle Bridge at 8:15 this morning.  Unless the other person gazing down at the river, on the north end, had walked over from the Inn or other hostelry.  The half dozen or more tour buses parked in town later in the day had not yet arrived.  Around mid-day, I lost count at 15 the number pointing lenses at the bridge.

In the morning, the mist rose slowly, and I took this picture.  The river had fallen further in the night, though the patches of foam, effervescence flowing from the broken water just upstream, seemed to flow faster than on other days.  I've noticed the the river creates each frothy shape unique.  As I watched them slide by today, I wondered what happened when they collided.  They merge, I saw.

When two bits of effervescence touch, they become one, and flow on enhanced.

October Rain

Around nine in the morning, yesterday, the view from the bridge, above, showed foam remnants outnumbering leaves on the eastward moving surface.  Light rain fell and wind ruffled the water as it approached the river's curve ahead.  This morning, Sunday, as I walked Jack, our Australian Shepherd mix, around 7:30 a.m., more water flowed than the day before, as rain fell much of Saturday.  The higher water submerged a length of the branch I have used to judge the Ottauquechee's level.  An accelerated current, with more volume, had overwhelmed the leaves, what had seemed like coracles playing in the sunlight were now flowing beneath the surface, ghostly shapes tumbling.

At five this evening, rubbing shoulders with a scrum of tourists, Jack and I were back on the bridge.  The marker branch showed several inches of wet surface, revealing how high the water came which had now receded.  This picture shows more sky than river.  It was the kind of evening when even Woodstock residents could not stay away from the covered bridge.  Locals mixed with bus-borne visitors, watching the river connect with all that surrounded it.

The Perfect Day

As today is my birthday, I treated myself to extra time on the bridge.  I was not alone.  At about 4:30 in the afternoon, the bridge shook with the footsteps of tourists.  With foliage near the height, clear skies and a temperature near seventy, our covered span draws visitors like honey bees to pollen.  Many choose to stand on the triangle of grass by the intersection with Rt. 4, pointing cameras at the Middle Bridge, today with the flaming leaves above and beyond it.  I don't blame them. The beauty today called for digital memories.

Lingering, I checked the level of the river as measured by a sizable chunk of wood, like a fence post, caught by some rocks on the north shore.  Over the past days more and more of it lies out of the water.  We have had little rain lately, so more rocks pop above the surface, and seem larger as the days pass.

Lower water and rocky stretches turns a placid flow into braided, frothy ripples.  One such stretch appears just west of the bridge, evidenced by an endless archipelago of island shaped foam remnants.  Like snowflakes, each one is made of the same fleeting stuff, yet all are different.  Seen from the bridge, they flow along, floating land forms, bristling with rounded headlands. 

Sailing leaves outnumbered the foam shapes today.  Seen from the bridge, fleets of them, mostly maple, serenely passed.  Drying leaves curl, and so create a coracle shape, perfect for floating down stream.  As the water comes under the bridge the swiftest current is on the left, then some feet beyond, it shifts to the middle and then the other side.

I watched a small spade-shaped yellow leaf fall from the tree overhanging the river at the south end of the bridge.  I followed it down.  It landed in a shallow reach where the current barely pushed.  My leaf edged slowly downstream and toward the middle.  Leaves and froth moved in a swifter way just a few feet out, but this one inched along with its fellows in the shallows.  Then their pace quickened and my leaf joined the faster parade of maple vessels heading east and out of sight.

Rivers and Rivers

I took the picture at 5:45 p.m., before a ride west on Rt. 4, following the course of the river upstream and watching the sunset flood the Ottauquechee.  Here are some quick facts.

The Ottauquechee as described by Wikipedia

The Ottauquechee River (pronounced AWT-ah-KWEE-chee) is a 41.4-mile-long (66.6 km) river in eastern Vermont in the United States.^[2] It is a tributary of the Connecticut River, which flows to Long Island Sound.
The Ottauquechee rises in the Green Mountains^[2] in eastern Rutland County in the town of Killington, and flows generally eastwardly into Windsor County, where it passes through or along the boundaries of the towns of Bridgewater, Woodstock, Pomfret, Hartford and Hartland; and the villages of Woodstock and Quechee. It joins the Connecticut River in the town of Hartland, about 4 miles (6 km) south-southwest of White River Junction.^[3]

 A headwaters tributary known as the North Branch Ottauquechee River flows southeastwardly through the towns of Killington and Bridgewater.^[3][4]

Quechee State Park is located along the river near the village of Quechee. Near the river's mouth the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' North Hartland Dam impounds the river to form North Hartland Lake.^[3]

Near the state park, the river flows through the 165-foot-deep (50 m) Quechee Gorge. The U.S. Rt. 4 bridge crosses over the gorge and provides good viewing down into its depths.[1]
In late August 2011, Hurricane Irene swept through the Ottauquechee River watershed, raising the water level in the river to far beyond its normal height. Houses and towns along the river were devastated.

The U.S. Board on Geographic Names settled on "Ottauquechee River" as the stream's name in 1908. According to the Geographic Names Information System, it has also been known historically as:^[5]

• Otta Quechee River
• Ottaquechee River
• Ottaqueeche River
• Queechee River
• Queechy River
• Water Quechee River
• Waterchuichi River
• Waterqueechy River
• Waterqueechy

Note:  I like Waterqueechy the best.

What is it like for the Ottauguechee?

In yesterday's post I posed the question given some of us at a retreat, "What is it like for you?" The "you" in this blog is the Ottauquechee.  This direct address brings closer to home Thomas Berry's magisterial words, "The universe is a communion of subjects, not a collection of objects."  My effort here is to explore the communion we have with this being, the river as it flows under the bridge to the east.

I used the "What is it like for you?" question in a sermon a few weeks ago.  One hearer reported  posing the question to a tree.  When she talked of it to her grandson, he could not resist a giggle.  It seems to me that engaging with the question requires what in fiction or drama is called "the willing suspension of disbelief."  We have become imbued with the belief that we humans are the only ones whose experience should be taken seriously.  To take seriously what Berry would call the "subjectivity" even, in a sense, personhood, of the "objects" surrounding us, requires imagination.   Another way to put it is that we need to engage in thought experimentation.  For instance, take the following hypothesis:  a river experiences the world and stands in relationship to me and everyone else.  If that is true, how can I understand what that experience is?  What does that mean for us?

The river by the bridge flows slowly these days.  The surface mirrors the sky.