More Love on the Bridge

In light of yesterdays' post on the love and the Middle Bridge, I share the photo below, taken at the point on the bridge where I take my pictures.

Bridge of Love

In the humid and hot air around 6 p.m., as I approached the bridge, a man took a photo of a woman leaning against the opening of the walkway.  Moments later she hugged him.

Justices of the Peace have performed marriages on this bridge.  I once witnessed a proposal here. Two photographers earlier this week took shots of two young women embracing one another in the middle of the street leading on to the bridge.  I officiated at a wedding last Saturday and overheard the bride refer to the "bridge pictures" that would be part of the day's program.  One December, "bridge pictures" were taken before the service at St. James, and the party arrived at the church coatless and freezing.

What is it about this bridge, love and marriage?

The River Turns the World Upside Down

A close-up of the surface shows the sky and trees speckled with foam bits from the upstream rapids.

In the afternoon, kids waded downstream in the 90 degree heat.

Clear on Clear

With this long string of clear days and the resulting drop in the level of the Ottauquechee, the life on the river seems more intense.  The insect skimmers skate on the river's surface tension by the hundreds.  Humans find all kinds of ways of getting into the water:  swimming, wading, tubing.  Birds dive in or paddle or drink from the nearly still waters below the bridge.  The images over the past two weeks have been remarkably similar, varying some as the stream shrinks.

Watching Ravens

This morning, with mist 

over the river, ravens

waited for the light.

Final Weeks

I began this river journal on September 27, 2014, with the intention of carrying it through for one year. With that plan in mind, I have three weeks and a day left before I finish.

My question of the Ottauquechee was and is, "What is it like for you?"  This must be an open-ended question.  The very nature of a river denies the idea of closure.  Of course, the river had a beginning, and will have an end, a lifetime beyond our comprehension.  Does the river have an experience?  For thousands of years, human beings took it for granted that rivers had spirits, conscious of what it did, even intending what occurred within and just beyond its banks.  We call this superstition.

In this age of human-caused damage to the Earth, the exercise of assigning a spirit to natural realities like rivers may have a surprising value.  Rivers have many characteristics we assign to sentient beings: movement, complex chemistry, acute responsiveness to its surroundings, voices, to name a few.

Whether conscious or not, rivers have a being: moving, speaking, nurturing, sometimes destroying.

Granting in the imagination a conscious being to the river, and asking the question - What is it like for you? - may allow us to know the river in ways we could not otherwise.  For sure, if we persist, we will meet the river in unexpected ways.

In the next weeks, as I bring this journal to a close, I will try to share the ways I have met the Ottauquechee, and admit the mysteries that remain.

Today, artists met the river from their perspectives, along the bank, near the bend before the now-dwindling rapids.

Bird Rising

Another misty morning along a quiet river.

Yesterday in the afternoon I took this close-up, somewhat attenuated, shot of the river edge. The darker vegetation on the left shows the highest level the river reached with the spring freshets.  The stream continues to dwindle.

As I took the picture, a bird plunged into the river for a bug or fish and swiftly flew out of the water.  The shot captured the bird rising, with the water disturbed just below.  In the calm stretch of water downstream from the bridge, the concentric circles bred by that plunge went as far as the other shore.