Orange 2

This morning's shot reruns yesterday's view: an ice-free river flowing well.  My post then declared my confusion at the sight of what appeared to be an orange swimming upstream.  Was it a round fish with tropical colors invading a Vermont waterway?

Today, I stared at the spot where the creature from the black river shook my confidence in the law of gravity.  In the picture above you can make out on the surface the inverted V-shape signature of the rock and gravel bank beneath it.  It forms almost a perfect triangle, with the bottom frame of the photo as the base.  The apex of the triangle is formed by the joining of the two stronger currents on either side of the central shallow. 

In watching that confluence this morning, I began to believe that the eddy created there had more power than I had thought.  The orange object had been lingering by what seemed like a patch of weed.  The more I looked, the more I decided that it was a patch of dead leaves, black like all the leaves now heading by under the surface.  The eddy at the junction of currents had captured enough of those leaves to lay down a dark mat.  I decided that it was, in fact, an orange, which would, being sort of liquid inside, be subject to the force of the vortex created by the currents coming together.  The orange's circling of the mat of leaves followed the path the leaves themselves might have taken before settling to the bottom.  The orange, submerged and yet floating still, never settled.  It just went around in circles, looking just like a fish nibbling at the edges of a succulent river weed.

By today, it had moved on.