Life these days has a curious lightness to it, a reprieve from worry. It is as if there is no longer anything to worry about, a palpable falsehood but there you have it.
I wake up, let the rabbit out. I chase the rabbit in and go to work. I come home and let the rabbit out. It darkens and I chase the rabbit in. A significant amount of my time is taken up with chasing rabbits these days, and I have learned from the experience. Sprinting is not a winning strategy, nor is assuming a set destination at any moment. I cannot outrun the rabbit, but I can outlast him, and I think now were I set out in the Mojave with a stick and knife I could keep myself well fed without breaking stride ever.
Were I eating mammals, I mean, which I am mainly not these days.
There are whales in the river again, humpbacks, and they have made it to the Port of Sacramento. How odd the fresh water must feel to them. How odd the sound must be in that confined current, the taste of Shasta snowmelt and Klamath rock. The authorities try to turn them back for their own good. There are too many careless knifeblade props in the water, too many who would try to jump the animals with their jet skis. Too many who would commune with them, as well. The last time this happened was a generation ago, and nothing worked to turn the whale around. He nosed up slough after muddy slough, ignoring all warnings, all entreaties, until they sang to him. They played humpback song on a boat-towed speaker, and he followed it back out through the Golden Gate.
The Sacramento is the nation’s largest unknown river. It rises in the sundew bogs of the Trinitys, the Jeffrey pine groves in the Warner Range, among the Sierran Big Trees, and all its arms, before the dams, ran cold and fast to the valley floor. There they gathered, a massive sea of snowmelt, and one braided, meandering channel to drain them into the delta’s skein of sloughs. On a flat plain a river travels more efficiently in meanders, and the Sacramento Valley is flat.
Five foot contour lines are separated by a quarter mile on Sacramento Valley topo maps, and they hint at the river’s history. Meanders form and deepen. They build goosenecks and then cut their throats, leaving oxbows. Tiny tributary creeks follow the old abandoned riverbeds, and then the inexorable river captures them again.
“Inexorable” — from a Latin word meaning unresponsive to persuasion — is not, I suppose, precisely the right word. One can persuade a river, at least for a time. One can channel the Newtonian Imperative, chain and riprap cutbanks, break levees into floodplains. But only briefly and then all our works will be occulted, odd rills and hollows overgrown with elder and grape and morel, incongruous rises and lakes on someday’s maps. All this will be lost and yet the river flows, and nothing to worry about any longer.
“...were I set out in the Mojave with a stick and knife I could keep myself well fed without breaking stride ever.”
Some years…maybe most years. But not all. Some years the coyotes have to spend the winter digging up hibernating tortoises.
“Meanders form and deepen. They build goosenecks and then cut their throats, leaving oxbows.”
...and Giant Gartersnakes!
It’s like a giant version of sidewalk weeds - and I mean that in a good way.
(One of my posts this week is going to be on control and perfection… reading this post just after writing it makes my synapses go “ping”! Thanks!)
If you would like to listen to the “mermaid” song they played to that wandering whale-Odysseus:
http://tinyurl.com/2rmpmq
First of all, it is nice to see your (or is it “you’re”?) broadening perspectives on life. I am relieved to find you recovering in your grief.
Second, survival in the desert with your knife and stick would make the cactus in the picture available (if nutrition challenged) as food. After some serious prep. And there are always lizards and snacks, uh, snakes.
Third, the fact that the [presumed] socially bereft/lovelorn whale followed the siren song makes one wonder: what was calling him up the Sacramento River? The turbines in a hydro plant? Pumps sucking water from the river? Something, which seemed like pheromones to him, in the water? He was Johnathon Livingston Humpback seeking to swim free on a higher plane (or something)? He wanted to talk to the Governator? Those damned Navy sonar thingies weren’t audible up there? He was a humpback trenchcoat rebel planning a dramatic violence statement (if he could just find the “school”; sorry, couldn’t resist. I KNOW they hang in pods!)? This was an aquatic equivalent of an Aussie “walkabout”?
Semantics: “Inexorable” seems a less definitive choice than “inevitable”, based on the lingual roots. But common usage seems to have made the two words almost synonymous. Like glaciers, erosion, and global warming are one or the other.
I was going to say something relevant
You mean that wasn’t?
I saw on Reuters science news, the mother whale has a serious injury from a boat keel. They are gonna start singing them down the river today.
Sing me back home
A song I used to hear
Make my old memories
Come alive
Sing me away
Turn back the years
Sing me back home
Before I die
-Merle Haggard
River gonna take me, sing me sweet and sleepy
Sing me sweet and sleepy all the way back home
It’s a far gone lullaby sung many years ago
Mama, Mama, many worlds I’ve come since I first left home
Going home, going home
By the waterside I will rest my bones
Listen to the river sing sweet songs
To rock my soul
-Robert Hunter
Black muddy river
Roll on forever
I don’t care how deep and wide
If you got another side
Roll muddy river
Roll muddy river
Black muddy river, roll
When it seems like the night will last forever
And there’s nothing left to do but count the years
When the strings of my heart start to sever
And stones fall from my eyes instead of tears
I will walk alone by the black muddy river
And dream me a dream of my own
I will walk alone by the black muddy river
Sing me a song of my own
And sing me a song of my own
-Robert Hunter
I knew of cats reacting to analogue bird-recordings, and not to digital recordings ...
But I never heard of dogs reacting to whale songs ... interesting ...
(no, I do not have pointed ears ;-))
thank you Theriomorph for sharing the story!
But in this case, the “siren song” turned out to be tugboat engines!