A Dinosaur View

The processes of nature we observe today are the same which have worked on the landscape for millions of years.  Nineteenth-century geologists came to this conclusion, one of the fundamentals of modern earth science.  In watching the river filled with sediment after last night's thunderstorms, we see the same dynamic viewed by an archaeopteryx or a pterodactyl.

Before the Storm

The evening light and early summer heat drew folks to the bridge.  A trio of visitors asked me to take their picture on the bridge.  I asked where they were from, "Oh, everywhere!" was the reply.

A thunder storm moves through the watershed tonight.

Clarity

Near high noon, the stream 

runs with more transparency 

than yesterday's mud.

Muddy Waters

After the deluge

the river carries wet earth,

someday to rise up,

Before the Storm and Later

The parent geese were back today with their two goslings.  In the late afternoon, a thunderstorm blew through. After it was over, I watched from the bridge as storm debris clouded the water.  A Massachusetts man in town for a construction project stood right at my usual vantage point, and spoke of the magic of the scene.  One of the goslings paddled around in the quiet water by the left bank.

The Middle Bridge

An owner of  land on the left bank graciously gave me permission to go down to the river's edge. Looking back, I took a picture of the Middle Bridge, my vantage point for the past months.

Circles and Circles

A light rain fell on the river this evening, creating the interweaving circus of rings that rain brings when each drop meets quiet water, a seeming infinity of expanding and vanishing circles, Venn diagrams out of control.

Ever Shall Be

This is daily post 202, toward my goal of blogging for a year on the Ottauquechee River.  My opening question still confronts me and the river, "What is it like for you?"  What is is it like to be this river?

A friend who doubles as a college president and zen priest, said to me, "Rivers, sure!  Zen loves rivers: always changing, always the same."

Joan Didion has transposed the Christian proclamation of the glory of God - "As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be... "  -  into a description of Earth's ancient and ongoing movements, from mountain building to erosion.  We can barely conceive of and never can know the antiquity and future of this little tributary.

Under the River

The geese have moved on with their goslings, although their mingled tracks can still be seen on the left bank from the bridge.  Yesterday I drove up the Ottauquechee again, entering Killington's north-south U-shaped valley.  I have been trying to make sense of the geology of this river's watershed, looking, among others, at a book aimed at little children.  It reads, "... you could say the [tectonic] plate is like the conveyor belt at a grocery store checkout lane... ."  I'm not complaining.  The metaphor from Under New England works.

It is clearer than "The enormous Taconic klippe is a remnant of the same thrust slices on the other side of the mountains 15 miles to the west.  Here [my location yesterday], the Ottauquechee River has positioned itself in the fault zone.  The broad valley has the characteristic gouged form indicative of ice erosion."  Roadside Geology of Vermont and New Hampshire, quoted above, tells us that among the complex of stone underneath and flanking the "broad valley" are the remnants of a 400 million year-old mountain range, in the form of the "Taconic klippe." A klippe being "an isolated erosional remnant of a slice carried on a thrust fault." In other words, a worn-down chunk of a bigger chunk that came from somewhere else, in this case eastern New York.

The strong sun and shallow water combined today with a northern breeze to create the picture below.

Morning

Geese

Yesterday

Two geese, three goslings.

Nearby, a crow stared, pacing.

The parents stared back.

Today

One goose sits near the 

water's edge, the other stands.

Little guys paddle.

Heaven

Downriver, dogs swam 

after sticks while children stood

at the water's edge.

Pellucid Waters

1.

Pellucid 

allowing the maximum passage of light, as glass; translucent.

2.

clear or limpid:

pellucid waters.

 

Above:  Sunday, May 17.  Below:  Monday, May 18

Noon Sun

A burst of noon sun

shone on the apple blossoms

passing downriver.

Fishing

This morning on the Green with Jack, I met a fly fishing professional laying out nine sets of waders and nine rods for a group of fishermen being shown the best spots along the nearby Ottauquechee.  He told me the river had been stocked with rainbow trout on May 9.   

Landing

In the early evening, as I arrived at the bridge, a duck inscribed a clean line on the water by the bend, trailing feet for a distance before landing.  In the picture, the small oval reveals the line's wake's spreading out. 

A River Shore

Today I saw a shorebird.  I caught sight of a familiar fluttering brown, sharp-winged shape just above the water.  The bird landed on the left bank, then proceeded to walk along the very narrow "beach" pecking away at the dark sand, wending its way in and out of the shallows.  I think it was a sanderling, a bird I see in small flocks racing up and down with the surf in August on the Rhode Island coast.  Was this lone stranger off course on a migration, an advance scout, a laggard?

Rising Again

With rain, the river 

rises, swirling, turning brown,

carrying its weight.

The River's Work

Today, the Ottauquechee bore away traces of hundreds of millions of years of rock formation and decay.  Every day, the stream carries on this task, delivering sediments, grains of sand and dissolved minerals to the Connecticut, then to the Long Island Sound, where between the coasts, layers of sand and mud accrete.  Geologists tell us these in their turn are destined to harden into rock, then be lifted up or crushed or melted, or all of the above, by brute tectonic force to become, somewhere, some day, a new Himalaya, before once again eroding down to next to nothing..

I have been trying to understand the roots of the land beneath this river.  From its source to its outflow, the waters touch the remains of continents with names that Tolkien would have embraced.  The Earth has so shuffled, cooked, crushed, melted, pushed and frozen the rock beneath our feet that every detailed explanation seems to end with a variation of the statement, "Of course, it is more complicated than this."

Above and Below

With the sight of the sediment-laden spring pulse, I have been wondering again about just what the Ottauquechee is taking downriver.  My casual research indicates much of the surface of the watershed consists of glacial till, sand and rocks left behind my the ice 13,000 years ago or so.

I'm still trying to understand what lies beneath the glacial remains.  Geological maps show a rock complex known as the Waits River formation underlying the region from Bridgewater to the edge of the Connecticut River.  These rocks, about 400 million years old, contain the evidence of the first creatures crawling out of the sea.  A book on roadside geology notes that these varieties of metamorphosed stone are "poorly exposed except in places along the river bed."

As one geologist put it, "grain by grain" these old, old pieces of rock make their way to the sea.

Visible and Invisible

The stream's quality as a mirror comes forward again.  In a way often invisible, the river takes on the qualities of the land around it.  A recent communication from the local water company, firmly based in the Ottauquechee watershed, pointed out, "The sources of drinking water (both tap water and bottled water) include rivers... . As water travels over the surface of the land or through the ground, it dissolves naturally occurring minerals and, in some cases, radioactive material, and can pick up substances resulting from the presence of animals or from human activity." 

Toward a "Green and Pleasant Land"

While spending a few days in the Hudson River watershed, I returned to summer-like heat, as if Nature wanted to force a whole continent of plants.  It is working.  Blooms leap out all over the place, from dandelions by the road to white blossoms scattered through ground cover, not to mention daffodils. 

As the world greens,

the river contracts, as if

pulled through root to leaf.

Blossoms In the Hudson River Valley

The Hudson

In the Hudson Valley near West Point, 86 degrees.

Sunlight

After days of drear, the sun shone on the Ottauquechee this morning. 

Below the bridge, bands of sunlight reveal the bottom for the first time this spring, 

now that the water is lower and sediment reduced.

Downstream at the bend, the sun strokes the trees and mild rapids.