The snow yesterday came with warmer temperatures, mixed with rain and sleet, sending water higher and faster, melting or sending downriver much of the border ice. I just checked the local level of cold on my iPhone, and the number dropped from 12 to 10 before my eyes. We will be near zero out there tonight, and colder further up the watershed. Someone I know up Barnard Brook, an Ottauquechee tributary, often measures the air 10 degrees colder than in the village.
A friend responded to my invitation to comment on these posts with two references. She told me of the Japanese animated film, Spirited Away, which I have not seen, but will find, as river spirits have a part, and she reminded me about Henry David Thoreau. The latter wrote A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, which I have already begun to revisit. Early in the book, Thoreau quotes the Roman poet Ovid with a verse form of the passage below, here in prose.
It is no less than the poet's description of a god creating rivers, once he had made the Earth-surrounding seas.
"… [He] added also springs, and numerous pools and lakes, and
he bounded the rivers as they flowed downwards, with slanting banks. These,
different in different places, are some of them swallowed up by the
Earth itself; some of them reach the ocean, and, received in the expanse of
waters that take a freer range, beat against shores instead of banks." Metamorphoses, Book I, Fable II.
A succinct description, 2000 years old.
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