Ice and Stone

Scraps of ice dislodged from center, left and right sectors of the river scraped in the shallows, flew by in swifter currents and dawdled along quieter edges.  In just a day, the ice jams which dominated this stretch of river disappeared, with shredded edges left along the banks.  This fleeting reign of ice held enough power, though, to change the river's dynamics coming out from under the covered bridge.

In the bottom part of the photo, you can make out a dim, slightly brown inverted V-shape.  The ice-altered currents brought to the center of the stream a bank of stones and gravel, raising the central river bed sufficiently to cause a split in the main current.  What had been a unified swift flow only days ago, shooting right out from the center of the river as it emerged from beneath the bridge, now appeared as two faster currents on the left and right of the rocky shallow the ice had thrown up.  The chaotic freezing and thawing of the past week left its mark in shifting stone.